Every now and again -- quite often, in fact -- I get an e-mail from someone who's discovered a bottle of wine in a bottom drawer. Sometimes it's an expensive bottle that was bought or given many years ago, then tucked away and forgotten. Other times it's an ordinary bottle that just got mislaid.
There are one or two questions in these cases. The first is what the bottle is worth. The second is whether the wine is still good.
The first question is difficult. A bottle of wine has little intrinsic value, and the market value of a single bottle is hard to assess unless it's a particularly sought-after wine (and vintage). Market value is what someone will pay for your wine, and that varies massively, depending on your luck finding a buyer.
Then there's the question of whether the wine is still good. In many cases the wine was not made for aging, and if many years have passed since the vintage, chances are the wine is well beyond its best. A bottle of Chardonnay that sells for $10 in the LCBO today will not taste very good in 10 years, no matter how carefully it's cellared.
(Wines in boxes and PET packaging has a shorter shelf life than wine in glass bottles. But I suspect that no one would try to cellar wines in those formats, anyway. It would just look odd.)
Other times, quality wines made for cellaring are kept too long. Some Bordeaux wines not only keep for decades, but improve over the long term, and excellent vintages might be at their best 20 years later. But most Bordeaux are made for early consumption and should be drunk within two or three years of the vintage.
Every now and again, I taste a wine that's been kept too long -- not because it got lost in a cellar, but because it's a great wine from a great vintage and was cellared well beyond its time. I was at a tasting of some 1961 classified Bordeaux last year, and I'd say that two or three of the half-dozen were past their best.
They were drinkable (well, one wasn't) and you could get a sense of what they must have been like in their prime.
It makes me wonder why some wine-lovers play chicken with expensive wines. It's like taking an old master and hanging it in direct sunlight for a few years, then admiring the faded picture because you can still see one or two flakes of paint that have their original colour and intensity.
If you're not sure whether a wine is too young or too old, and you have to choose, it's better to drink it too early than too late. As for what to do when you find that lost bottle in the bottom of a drawer, there's really only one way of finding out for sure if it's still good: open it and taste it. Just make sure you have another bottle of wine at hand in case your lost bottle turns out to be a lost cause.
Four varied and well-priced wines on today's rack.