>Different folks like their wines at differing stages of
>maturity. I am a relative oenopaedophile compared to the likes of Ian
>Hoare, Bill Spohn and John Taverner (to name but a few) -- yet
>I still age
>many wines for a decade or more before drinking them. You will make up
>your own mind about how long to give them before they reach their peak in
>your eyes. That's why it's so useful to buy multiple bottles of a wine and
>drink it at various stages of its development. You learn not only about
>the wine, but also about your own tastes. Too many people use Robert
>Parker's or the Wine Spectator's "expected maturity" as some sort of gospel,
>when in fact it assumes a common set of tastes and storage conditions,
>neither of which is a particularly good assumption.
>
>HTH
>Mark Lipton
>
>
I should take your advise Mark. I don't buy enough cases of things.

With regard to the expected maturity, even with a fixed set of storage
conditions and tastes, bottle variation is significant with older wines. So if
I take my geriatric tastes in wine and two different bottles of the same wine
from my cellar, one may by chance be far more foreward (ready) than another.

I think this is something all of us with cellars are aware of, but it something
a new taster needs to understand. This is another reason not to take the wine
writer's opinions on drinking windows as gospel.

So why was my 93 Beaune Montremenots (Mussy) so lacking in fruit? Another
bottle last year was great. Maybe my TCA insensitive palate could not detect a
possible problem, or maybe its just dumb now. I have no way of being sure.

Tom Schellberg