How Time is the Essence of Wine

From the scientific to the subjective

Oct 24, 2024

A few years ago, I read a book called The Missing Ingredient by Jenny Linford. I don’t read much non-fiction, preferring to escape into the pages of a novel, but for some reason I made an exception and Jenny’s message has stayed with me ever since. The basic premise is that when we talk about food, we think in ingredients – eggs and flour, onions and garlic. But in fact, the most important ingredient in most recipes is time: whether it’s a matter of seconds (searing a tuna steak, for instance) or a matter of days (leaving a jar of kimchi to do its fermentation work on the kitchen counter). The author gives dozens of examples in between, but you get the idea.

I was daydreaming about this book last weekend and how relevant it is in so many different contexts – including wine. When most people consider the role of time in producing wine, they’re thinking about the way some wines are aged before being drunk. In fact, there’s a common misconception (excellently dispelled recently by George Nordahl in his myth-busting article) that it’s always a good idea to age wine. When in fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth: most wines are designed to be drunk young, and very few are of good enough quality to improve with age.

But time plays many, many more roles in what’s in your glass.

Time in the vineyard

Before you can even think about picking grapes, you need a vine on which to grow them. Most vines are around three or four years old before they can produce grapes suitable for winemaking, and even then it’s probably not great quality. If you’ve ever seen “vieilles vignes” on a wine label, you might have deduced that it refers to vines that are 30+ years old – resulting in wines that have far greater complexity and concentration of flavour than their younger vine counterparts.

But while the years of a vine’s life play a role, the moment that grapes are harvested plays perhaps a more important one. In hot regions in particular, grapes are often harvested at night when it’s cooler, in order to preserve their acidity as they start their journey to becoming wine. In cooler regions, bad weather can set back harvest time by days or weeks (and the opposite is also true: climate change has brought harvest forward in many recent vintages). Wines that are characterised by their bright acidity – like Champagne – generally require an earlier grape harvest, whereas wines that require luscious sweetness – like Sauternes – require late harvesting once the grapes have developed so much sugar that plenty is left over after fermentation.

Time in the winery

Having made their way from the vineyard to the winery, for freshly plucked grapes, time is of the essence. Most wines are made by pressing the grapes as quickly as possible, before they might lose their freshness or start fermenting inside their skins. (There are some exceptions to this, but we’ll leave those for another time.)

Once the grapes have entered the fermentation tank, time is the critical factor once again. I’ve written before about how the depth of colour in rosé wines is defined by how long the grape juice spends in contact with the skins (the longer the maceration, the darker the hue). And I’ve also written about how tannins come from grape skins – whether in red wines or orange wines – with the length of time and the extraction method being crucial to the level of tannins. Suffice to say that the contact time between juice and skins could be anything from a few hours to a few weeks – with dramatically diverging results in the final wine.

Time in the bottle

When you buy a bottle of wine, often the only indication of time on the label is the vintage. Enough people have asked me what that year actually refers to that I think it bears repeating: the vintage is the year the grapes were harvested. It doesn’t refer to when the wine was bottled, or when it was released for sale. If, right now, I were to buy a wine that’s a 2023 vintage from Europe, those grapes would have been harvested only around a year ago (if it’s from the southern hemisphere, we’re talking 18 months).

The most extreme example at the short end of the spectrum is Beaujolais Nouveau: “new” because the wine is released on the third Thursday in November of the same vintage. That means the grapes are picked in early autumn, quickly fermented and bottled, ready to drink only two months later. Whether you like that style of wine or not, it doesn’t improve as time goes on. If you’ve ever discovered a leftover bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau the following summer, you’ll know what I mean.

At the other end of the spectrum, the famous Barolo from Italy’s Piedmonte has to spend at least 18 months in oak barrels before it’s bottled, and isn’t even allowed to be released for sale for over four years – so prized is the wine (and, arguably, so harsh are the tannins). Even then, I wouldn’t recommend drinking it right away. A friend gave me a 2019 Barolo very recently – I thanked her profusely and then put it away in storage to be forgotten about for a few years while it softens up around the edges.

The essence of time

So far, the influence of time on our wine has been pretty scientific. People have studied the effects of old vines, new barrels, short maceration and the like – with the effect on the final wine being expected if not guaranteed. But there’s another form of time at play that we tend to forget about: it’s not linear, it’s highly subjective and it distorts in every direction. It also gets more complex the older we are and the more experiences we have under our belts.

A bottle of bubbles opened to celebrate a promotion may well taste brighter and more effervescent than that same wine on another occasion. A rich red in the bath at the end of a stressful day might invoke entirely different feelings than it would at any other moment. The aroma of a wine we once shared with someone special (just like the scent of an ex-lover’s cologne on a stranger in the metro) can transport us back 20 years.

Conversely, anyone who’s brought home a bottle that they found delightful while overlooking a sunset beach in the Algarve will know that the effect can be dizzyingly different on a drizzly Tuesday evening in Amsterdam. In other words, time can be a fickle thing.

If there’s a lesson in all of this (and maybe there doesn’t need to be), it’s to remind us that wine – like life – is fleeting. The precise nature of a particular wine in this exact moment will never be the same again – for both the scientific reasons and the subjective ones. And while wine can invoke a memory or a mood, it can never pin down the moment. Mindful of that, we should perhaps appreciate the present more than we do.