Check It Before You Wreck It

This is a post about 2006 Silver Oak, but it is also not a post about 2006 Silver Oak.

It’s a reminder that September is a great time to take a look at your wine inventory.

One of the things I love about having a wine cellar is that I can set it and forget it. I know that my wines are well-stored, they’re temperature and humidity controlled, and they’re hanging out aging happily, just waiting for me to visit, or better yet, for me to pluck one of them when the mood is right.

If you’re a collector of Bordeaux blends, Red Burgundy, and Napa Cabs, like me, it’s easy to buy a case of wine and leave it to age for decades, knowing that it will be well worth the wait.

Cases are easy to check over time. I like to drink a bottle in year one, and based on what I find, drink another bottle every 3-5 years to see how it’s aging.

Individual bottles are harder to keep an eye on—those special splurges you picked up or a treasured gift from a friend. You have just one bottle, so when do you open it?

This past weekend we decided to open a 2006 Silver Oak that we’d been hanging on to for about 13 years. Friends were visiting, we were making meat for dinner, and we’d just received a magnum of 2019 to age in its place: a perfect swap.

Boy, am I glad we did. While Napa Cabernets of this quality can easily age for 20-25 years, at 18 years old, this bottle was at its peak, if not, starting to decline. Why did this one peak a little early? My guess is that it’s our fault. We bought this before we had proper wine storage, and it survived a flight from California in our luggage, and a few different wine fridge relocations, before making its way to our cellar.

While still pretty purple in color, the wine was showing slight signs of oxidation (a garnet color) around the edges. I could detect just a hint of oxidation on the nose. It tasted like gorgeous, ripe black cherries, with the most subtle tannins, as they had largely fallen away. (There was plenty of sediment at the bottom of the bottle.) There was no need to decant. Additional oxygen would’ve flattened out the wine—which I kept trying to tell my friend who was swirling her glass to no end. 😉

Could we have waited another year to open this? Sure.
Would it have declined in quality? Quite possibly.
Was it the perfect bottle of wine to open with great friends during my first successful attempt to cook fall-off-the-bone ribs and some burgers? No doubt.

PSA: Check your wines before you wreck your wines.
It just might be time to serve them.

Chin!