Buying wine

Two labelling philosophies split the world, and knowing which one you’re holding tells you where to look.

• The smallest place named. Region → village → single vineyard, in ascending order of specificity and usually of ambition. This is the most useful thing on any Old World label.
• Alcohol. A genuine style signal. 12% suggests cool climate and light; 15% suggests warm climate and full. It’s legally required and hard to fudge.
• Vintage. Matters most where weather is unreliable, which is to say Europe more than anywhere else.
• The producer. In Burgundy this outranks everything else on the label. Elsewhere it’s a reliability signal once you know a few names.
• Estate-bottling. Mis en bouteille au château/domaine, or "Estate Grown". The producer grew the fruit rather than buying it, which usually means more control and more accountability.

"Reserve" is legally meaningless in most countries, including New Zealand, Australia and the United States - Spain and Italy are the notable exceptions, where it denotes defined ageing. "Old vines" is unregulated almost everywhere. Medals may be from a competition that awards them to a third of entrants. Heavy bottles and elaborate embossing correlate with marketing budget, not quality, and are increasingly an environmental liability.

The tasting note on the back is written by the marketing department and can be ignored. The technical data sometimes printed alongside it can’t: residual sugar, acidity, harvest date, oak regime. A producer who prints those numbers is telling you they have nothing to hide.

On a cheap bottle, most of the price is tax, packaging, freight and retail margin - the wine itself may be a very small fraction. Because those fixed costs stay roughly constant as the price rises, the proportion spent on actual wine climbs steeply at first.

That gives the most useful buying rule there is: the jump in quality from the cheapest bottle to a mid priced one is enormous, and the jump from mid priced to expensive is much smaller. Doubling your spend at the bottom of the market transforms what you get. Doubling it at the top buys scarcity and reputation.

For anything you’ll drink within a year or two, almost nothing matters. For bottles you intend to keep, four things do, in this order.

• Stable temperature - more important than cold temperature. Repeated cycling expands and contracts the wine, pushing it past the closure. A steady 18°C beats a cupboard swinging between 10 and 25.
• Darkness - UV degrades wine, which is why bottles are green or brown in the first place. Clear-glass rosé is particularly vulnerable.
• On its side, for cork - keeps the cork wet and swollen. Irrelevant for screwcaps, which can stand upright indefinitely.
• Stillness - vibration is the least important factor and the one most often oversold by people selling storage.

The worst place in most houses is the kitchen: warm, bright, and subject to daily temperature swings. An interior wardrobe on the ground floor is usually better than any wine rack on display.

Probably less than you think. Around 90 percent of wine is made to drink young, and keeping it achieves nothing. Cellaring is worth it for wines with the structure to reward it - high acid, firm tannin, real concentration - and for the specific pleasure of watching a wine change.

If you do want to, buy several of one wine rather than one each of several. Six bottles opened over a decade teach you how that wine changes. Six different bottles teach you nothing, because you never find out whether you opened any of them at the right moment.