I started here! About 7 or 8 years ago, I decided to try an experiment. I decided to see if I could identify relatively cheap commercial wines that would benefit from aging. This is somewhat of a contradiction in terms -- wine, especially inexpensive wine, that is ready to drink now is generally thought to lack the necessary ingredients to age well. For example, a chief factor that
vins de garde (wines that should be aged) possess is plenty of tannins; a tannic wine may be awful to drink now, but delightful to drink down the road.
What I did was to keep a wine notebook, and to try many, many different wines. I rated them on a number of factors, and kept my eye out for wines that I enjoyed, but that I thought were kind of astringent and pucker-inducing. After about 6 months of this, I bought cases of about 6 or 8 different wines, and stored them in a closet in my basement. (I tell my friends that my goal was to turn $9 bottles of wine into $11 dollar bottles!
) As it happens, I mostly bought Cabs and Zinfandels, although I sampled many other varieties, too. I kept track of how long I aged them, and opened them at different aging times.
Some of the wines I chose benefited from aging; in some cases, quite a bit. Some never improved much. Some changed their character, from fruit bombs into something more subtle. Some improved, but are now past their prime. I did learn quite a bit from this exercise.
If your pockets are deep, you likely wouldn't go wrong to buy some expensive California big reds (likely Cab) from Napa or Sonoma; your wine dealer could provide some guidance. If your budget was similar to mine, I (of course) recommend you do what I did, and sample many wines, keeping notes, with this goal in mind. Then just buy a number of cases; in my case, I never regretted having lots of wine on hand "just in case"!
