Twenty Years On: The 1995 Vintage
The joy of having a well-stocked wine cellar is that it allows you to leave some bottles to mature for a reasonable length of time. As a novice drinker I used to approach ten-year old bottles with a sense of awe, but I have since learnt that the majority of wines I buy will attain this age, developing in a positive fashion as they do so, without any real difficulty. And they have at ten years hardly started on their journey to maturity, which for many serious wines can take not ten, not fifteen, but perhaps twenty years. Today ten-year old wines – such as those recently featured in my 2005 Ten Years On tasting, mostly from Germany – seem rather youthful and confident in the majority of cases. Ultimately, I suppose my experience with older wines is much greater these days, and as my cellar has matured I have access to many older wines, and thus the context in which I approach older wines has changed.
As a cellar matures, however, so do we. And over time, especially over a period of two decades, it is perhaps inevitable that our tastes will change. As I pulled these wines from the cellar, I noted that I simply don’t actively seek out and purchase many of these wines any more. I have moved on from buying Champagne, for the reasons already discussed in my 2000 Fifteen Years On tasting. I can’t remember the last time I bought a wine from Alsace, the Rhône Valley or the other French wine regions featured here. I do know that the Gran Reserva 904 from La Rioja Alta was a more recent addition to the cellar, but even that was a few years ago. So for me this was more than just a tasting; it was a time travel experience, taking me back to when the style of wines I bought and drank was very different to what it is today. As the style of wines coming out of southern France and the Rhône Valley seemed to become warmer, softer, more alcoholic and more raisined, I drifted away from these regions to more cooler climate styles.
