Sommelier Tastes the Same Wine at 5 Ages (1978-2016)

Anyone can start aging wine.

That means you, too.

Anyone.

You just need a dark, quiet place,

no vibration.

Tuck the wine in there.

Twiddle your thumbs for the next 30 years,

and magic happens.

Hey, I'm sommelier André Mack,

and today, we're going to taste the exact same wine

at five different ages from 2016 to 1978.

A lot can happen to wine,

and especially over five different decades,

and today we're going to take a deep dive inside.

[upbeat jazz music]

Most wine in America,

I think 90% of wine is consumed

within 24 hours after purchase,

but if you have a chance to taste any wine

that's aged for quite some time, you know,

I like to compare it to a caterpillar

transforming into a butterfly.

It would definitely change your perception of wine.

So, today I'm really excited

to introduce you guys to Heitz Cellar,

considered one of the top Napa Valley wineries.

It's all the exact same varietal,

which is actually in the industry

known as a vertical tasting.

Right, so it's exact same wine

tasting over many different vintages, 40-something years.

This is a pretty baller tasting

with a legend within Napa Valley,

Joe Heitz.

So, the first thing we're going to look at today

is going to be the bottles and the labels.

I think the biggest thing

that you're going to look at here is vintage.

Vintage means that at least 97% of those grapes

have to be harvested during that particular year.

So, that doesn't indicate

when the wine actually went into bottle,

but they were harvested somewhere

around the later part of that year.

And then they have to go through fermentation

and the whole winemaking process.

And then generally,

they're aged in oak casks for quite some time,

anywhere from 18 to 24 months.

I always like to think of oak barrels

more as seasoning, right?

It's like salt and pepper.

And at the end of that, it's finally bottled.

So, just like wines have ratings,

you know, some people go through

vintages have ratings,

and when we talk about a good year or a good vintage,

we're talking about great growing conditions,

the weather is right.

Wine is this living, breathing thing

that really depends on Mother Nature, right?

To get the best crop, and you get one shot at it each year,

and that's kind of what makes it special.

I think with anything collectible,

the price tends to shoot up.

Old vintage American wine is pretty hot market right now,

so a lot of those prices are starting to skyrocket.

I like to think that you're paying for the time,

the time that it's been aged.

It's not a lot of it around anymore.

You're paying for the magic, you know, the integration,

the experience of drinking something old.

You can see the evolution of the labels.

You know, for a couple of years,

they almost look exactly the same,

and then, you know, on the 2016,

it looks like there was a label change.

It looks a little bit more modern.

You know, we're all into storytelling.

There's a little verbiage

telling the story about the winery.

The government label is on every single wine as that is law.

But if you look at something like 1978,

there is no back label,

and as you look at all the capsules,

you can see how they've all changed<

and something here in the nineties,

they actually put a wax covering on it.

[tapping]

This is somewhat porous,

but this is like so the corks

don't push up over time through the foil

and expose the wine to oxygen.

But this was definitely a nineties thing.

All of these are artifacts from the era.

It's really interesting,

especially when you think about wines from Europe

in this particular era, like these two,

they would always tell you to cut underneath the second lip

or pull it directly off because these actually contain lead.

So, you didn't want any lead in your wine

when you were pouring from the bottle.

I think another great visible thing that you can see

is the ullage,

and that's just a fancy word for the fill level.

As wine is aged, you know, it evaporates a tiny bit.

You want to take a look at the ullage.

If anything is at shoulder level,

these are considered the shoulders of the bottle,

then you know the wine has gone through

some type of trauma during the aging process,

whether, you know, overheating and there's been some seepage

or stuff like that.

So, we're going to open these up

and look at the tops of these corks.

So, we're going to pop up in the 2016 right now.

So, we look here.

This cork, very clean.

It looks brand new.

So, this is a current release.

That's something that I would expect.

You know, it's porous, right?

It's a closure,

but it's slightly porous.

That allows small bits of oxygen to kind of seep through

and break down the wine over time,

enhancing the aging process.

[cork pops]

So, very clean cork.

It looks fairly new.

Light-color wine.

So, this is 2007.

This looks fairly new.

You know, I just always rip these off.

You can see how the cork is red.

It's saturated with wine here.

So, we can tell that the wine

has been stored properly on its side.

And also, you know,

you want the wine to be in contact with the cork

just to keep the cork moist.

When a cork starts to dry out, it allows more oxygen in,

and wine starts to seep out.

So, you can look at all these labels.

The first thing you can tell that they're pretty clean.

When a wine seeps,

you can see it going down the side of the bottle

or onto the label.

That's a telltale sign

that something happened in the cellar.

[cork pops]

So, we have 2016 here.

Over here, we have the 2007.

So, 2007 and a little bit darker.

You can see that for sure.

This is a little difficult with a wax top,

and generally what I tell people,

try not to cut it by cutting it.

You know, I've seen people cut their thumbs

and things like that.

It's probably easier just to go directly in,

and then it'll pop right off.

Hit it once,

and then you'll hit it again.

And look at that.

Just like a true professional, I broke the cork.

It happens, so don't worry.

Wine has been in it since 1994,

so it's, you know, it's starting to seep up.

It's a little softer.

It's a little bit pliable,

so you'd have to take your time doing it.

This is interesting.

This is a Durand.

So, this is, you know, a combination.

This is called an Ah-So,

and this is a kind of one of the first corkscrews.

They call it a butler's corkscrew,

and you have these two thin blades on the side here

that you kind of like pinch inside,

and you wedge them between the cork and the bottle.

And this is what we're all familiar with.

This is called the helix,

and so this keeps the cork in one piece.

You know, I just want to tell everybody, it's like,

we're not wine snobs.

We're just nerds, right?

You know what I mean?

Like, all this information is not to be arrogant

and to be an [beep] about it.

It's something that, you know,

we're passionate about and which ultimately makes us nerds.

We're going to slide this in either side of the cork.

We've inserted the helix.

We're all the way in,

and then now we just slowly turn and pull.

[cork pops]

There you go.

So, we're moving to 1985.

When you start to get in some of the older wines,

you definitely want to compare the vintage on the cork

to the vintage on the front label.

As you start to collect wine,

there's a lot of money that goes into it,

which means that there's possibly counterfeit.

All right, and now it's 1978.

So, now if you look at this, this is impeccable for 1978.

Looks almost brand new.

It's amazing.

I'm older than this wine.

If you're asking that.

[chuckles]

The scariest part of all of it is

when you're extracting the corks,

sometimes I've seen, you know, the glass break,

and at that point you can't serve the wine.

Give it a little muscle.

So, you can see the bottom here has wine on it.

Looks like full contact.

See how it's kind of seeped up here a little bit?

And then you can see the vintage here, 1978.

After opening all these bottles, I'm pretty excited.

Now we're going to move on

and take a look at their appearance.

So, we have the 2016 here.

You can see it's like bright.

Kind of exuberant.

Just has a shine and a sheen to it.

So, just looking at it, I'm like, oh,

this looks like, you know, new wine,

fresh wine, young wine.

You know, this looks like a neon raspberry to me,

and actually, that's not a wine term, I know.

Normally to examine a wine's color

and to have it tell you more secrets,

you want to turn it on its side slightly,

and what you want to look at is the outer rim,

which is known as the meniscus.

If it has a watery rim,

it means that the wine is pretty young.

Red wine gets its color from the skins,

and so during the winemaking process,

we soak the juice on the skins, and that extracts color.

It also extracts a few other things.

It's going to extract, you know, tannin.

Tannins are astringent.

It's more of a feeling that you get than a flavor,

and tannin kind of sucks the moisture out of your mouth,

leaving your mouth kind of dry,

so there's many different phenols in wine,

tannin being one of them,

and these different compounds and molecules

attach to each other and start to fall out of a wine,

which produce sediment.

So, the pigment in the color of wine,

as it starts to age, over time,

they start to combine with other compounds

and start to fall out of the wine.

So, as a wine starts to age, the color fades,

and we can see that over the range

of the bottles that we'll open today.

So, now we're pouring the 2007.

Kind of lost that lip gloss kind of raspberry thing

that was happening before.

As you start to look at it,

there is a little bit of water rim on the meniscus

showing that it is youthful,

but not as much as the previous one.

We have the 1994,

and automatically you can just see the difference.

A little bit more brickish.

There is a little bit of watery rim,

just slightly less than the previous wine.

Yeah, you can definitely tell that it's older.

So, with this particular wine,

we're starting to get into some of the older wines.

This is the 1985.

I would recommend decanting

just to kind of remove the sediment from the wine, right?

'Cause that's a very unpleasant drinking experience.

This is called a cellar rat, and it comes with a candle,

but we just modified it by using a flashlight.

So, we're going to pour the wine and decant it

slowly into the decanter.

We want to light up the neck

so we can know when to stop pouring

as we start to see some of the sediment come through,

and I'm constantly monitoring the neck

to just make sure that there's not a flow of sediment

seeping into the wine.

As you can tell, it's not an exact science.

All right, so we have sediment trapped in the neck.

So, we decanted the wine here,

and we can actually see what's left here.

So, actually when I turn the glass up here,

you can see it clinging to the side of the glass.

It's almost like a soot that tastes almost sandy, granular,

and so you kind of want to remove that.

Definitely an old wine, just looking at it.

It's starting to be really brick.

You know, a brick that was a little bit faded.

No watery meniscus,

so this is telling you that the wine

has some sign of age to it.

2016 here. 1978 here.

You can see a big difference in the color.

So, red with more like a purple hue here,

kind of shiny and glossy.

Here for '78, it's brickish orange.

It doesn't jump at you.

It's not as bright.

I'm totally excited.

Like, this is what I live for.

This is a great tasting.

It actually is.

This is like, cool.

This is like higher on the food chain,

like good [beep] here.

This is a really fun experiment.

All right, so next up, we're going to taste the wine,

so we're going to be looking

for a couple of different things.

Fruit, acid, alcohol, tannin,

and the overall taste of the wines.

We're gonna start with a 2016.

I'm just gonna hop in and start to taste.

[slurps]

So, there's definitely like a fruit component.

Not over-the-top,

which sometimes you would really associate

with Napa Valley Cabernet.

It's got pretty good acid.

You know, sides of my tongue are starting to tingle.

That's an indicator of a wine having good acid.

Alcohol seems pretty moderate.

It's not hot.

That's just industry talk for it being overly alcoholic.

One of the reasons why you would lay down a wine

or age a wine is so that, you know,

all of these three components

become more symbiotic with each other,

producing a much more balanced wine-drinking experience.

Primary fruit is generally fruit

that is expressive of that grape exactly,

and then young wines, you tend to get, you know,

that jammy, overly fruity ripe fruit.

That's the grape talking to you in a young wine.

If the wine was too overly fruity or jammy,

I think it could benefit from some aging.

This wine has pretty decent acidity,

which leads me to believe that this should age pretty well.

So, we have 2007.

I'm just going to dive right in.

Already, it just feels like a more depth of fruit, right?

It just goes down layers and layers.

It smells a lot richer.

It's kind of like night and day already from 2016 to 2007.

[slurps]

I mean, that's amazing.

No tannins at all.

So, you know, there's no astringent drying-out of the mouth.

There is some acidity.

It still has fruit to it.

Lots of fruit, really ripe, but not overly ripe.

This is a totally different wine compared to the 2016.

You know, the maturity of fruit.

It's almost like, you know,

you took ripe fruit off the vine for '16.

This fruit, you put it in the pot

and you added a little bit of heat to it,

and now you're starting to,

the flavors are commingling

and you can smell a little bit of it,

and so it has layers to it.

As wine changes over time,

the structure of the wine changes.

It tastes more velvety.

A lot of times when we talk about structure,

we talk about whole milk versus 2% milk

and how it coats your palette,

and so you're going from whole milk,

which is kind of fatty and rich

and kind of thick on the mouth, to skim milk,

where it's just a little bit more refined.

Now we're moving on to 1994,

one of the greatest vintages of my time of being in wine.

Also probably one of the greatest vintages ever in Napa,

so I'm super excited to taste this wine.

Oh no.

Oh no.

It's corked.

So, this wine is undrinkable.

I don't think that you would get sick if you drank it,

but it's not what the wine intended to be.

And so this is affected.

It affects quite a few bottles,

and this is a taint from a faulty cork

that makes it smell like a wet cardboard or a wet animal,

like a wet dog.

Cork is a living, breathing thing as well,

so it can be affected by a taint or a virus that's in it,

and it affects the wine, and generally speaking,

one bottle out of every case is corked.

It's a shame, but it happens.

It goes with the territory, you know what I mean?

Like, you know,

the hard part is if you paid for it,

and now you have to figure out, you know,

a lot of times there's no recourse to get your money back.

This is crazy.

So, now we have 1985.

It should be fun.

[slurps]

Yeah, so like dark bing cherries, leather, tobacco,

tiny bit of cedar,

and a think that I always get like in old wines

is like a dash of soy sauce,

which is always kind of weird.

It's not the salty part that you get.

It's kind of more the fermentation part of it that you get.

This is like an old leathers catcher's mitt.

You know, it's like walking into a vintage store.

Not overly tannic.

Pretty round.

Great acid.

There's still some fruit left to it.

2007, that's when you started to get that primary fruit

that was, like, kind of ripe, rich, that kind of thing,

and now you're starting to get

what we like to call the tertiary flavors to it.

So, when I talk about soy sauce and leather,

and it's making for a more balanced wine, in my opinion,

but you know, you like what you like.

And so if you like more youthful jammy wines,

then I guess you should drink those.

To me, this '85 is kind of right at its peak,

but I'm not sure what happens in '78.

I'm intrigued,

and I'm super stoked that we do have '78 so we can compare.

All right, so '78.

Here we go.

[slurps]

Wow, so, [coughs]

and this is the funny thing about wine,

whereas you thought '85,

that particular showing in '85 might have peaked

at least a little bit, in my opinion,

like I didn't think it could get any better.

The '78 is phenomenal.

It still has like this core, rich thing of fruit.

It has leather.

It has, wow,

it's got acid still.

It's a little bit more light-bodied.

It's not like a long finish.

It's got spice to it.

There's a tad bit of anise to it.

Just a total different experience.

Like, if you look at this versus 2016 or '07,

you would almost think that this was

a different grape varietal.

From a nerd's perspective,

you get excited about that

because this is, you're drinking history, in a way.

This wine, I think, is exceptional.

Wine's just an incredible thing, right?

It changes and evolves over time,

and is this accessible to people?

I think that's like the biggest thing.

Like, I know that this isn't possible

for a lot of people at this level.

So, if you ever get a chance to do something like that,

I would recommend it.

It's just a great kind of way to kind of geek out over wine.

You know, a lot of times,

there's no recourse to get your money back,

because you know, it's a final sale kind of thing,

so you have to eat it.

[Producer] Bon Appétit's getting the bill?

I think so.

[laughs]

I think so.

This is crazy.

I encourage you all to smell this.