The joys of the “vertical”

By “vertical”, I don’t mean standing upright on ones own two feet (though this position does allow for such useful actions as walking to go get another bottle of wine), but rather having in one’s possession 3 or more bottles of consecutive vintages of a particular wine. Obviously this assumes that one “collects” or stores fair amounts of wine in one place or another, but in these days, that includes more and more people, so the “vertical” is a reality for greater numbers of “serious” wine drinkers, and in my mind, it is one of the hallmarks of the “advanced” oenophile…

Many of the following points may be old news for the old hands out there, but for some, it might not be, and so we go…Most drinkers who lay down verticals are doing so with “culty” labels. The tacit assumption with these cult wines is that they will increase in value due not only to the supposed quality of the wine in the bottle, but to the “certain unquantifiable something” that makes the wine a cult wine in the first place. There is certainly some consideration taken in how well these wines might be DRINKING in X number of years, and the wines more than likely will get drunk up eventually, but just like the folks who take family heirlooms onto THE ANTIQUES ROAD SHOW claiming that they don’t care what an item is worth because it would never be for sale, but stick around for the monetary evaluation nonetheless, many vertical collectors are just as much in the game for the estimated dollar value of their portfolios as they are for the same collection’s sensory value.

As always, you should collect what you like, but for me, it’s more about what you like to DRINK than the profit you can turn from selling what you might be drinking (perhaps even to someone else who won’t drink the wine either, and so on…). Hey, wine is not a bad investment, but real estate, or just a good, steady string of deposits into a good mutual fund is MUCH better, and Cabernet frankly, safer too. No, to me the return on your investment of TIME is the luxury of experiencing what can only be experienced via the proper aging of fine wine, namely the most sublime flavors and aromas accessible to the human palate.

A few words on what verticals “mean”. There’s more than a little bit of the scientific method at work in the nature of what verticals “mean”, and by that I mean that woven into the very fabric of what verticals are is the notion that there is one and ONLY one variable: VINTAGE. All other potentially variable factors - producer, site, grape blend (if applicale), etc. are IDENTICAL. This clearly gives the drinker LOADS of insight into the vagaries of vintage, and how a producer handles those variables. People who are skeptical that great variances exist amongst any given set of wines become instant converts at vertical tastings. I know of no clearer method to show the skeptics just how real (not to mention obvious) all of these supposed non-existant differences between wines really are. Hallelujah!

Now here’s the other part of verticals that even some die-hard verticalizers don’t utilize, and this I’m going to call it the “parallel vertical” (the poop’s really flowin’ today)…ready? You’ve got multiple bottles of every 21st century vintage from your favorite high-end Greek producer, Attic Cellars (i.e. 2000 through 2005). Just down the road from Attic lies Metropolis Farms, another of your favorites from the region. You’ve got multiple examples of their 2000-2005 releases as well. With these two holdings, you now have control over almost every possible variable within a single wine region: vintage and producer. The only other potential problem that one could encounter in the “parallel vertical” would be in regions like Bordeaux or Chianti - essentially wines that are almost always blends, and which allow for variation in permissable varieites as well as the minimum/maximum percentages of those varieties. In wine regions that produce variably blended wines, the potential comparisons are not quite as black and white, but in places like Barolo and Burgundy and Ribera del Duero where one and only one grape is permitted, the potential for great insight becomes clear.

And I think that you can pretty clearly see what those possibilities are, but a couple of examples might be in order…One fascinating comparison might be selecting a “lesser” vintages as a focus. Open bottles of the same vintage form the two different producers and try to judge who handled his challenges better…one could then do the same experiment with multiple lesser vintages, using for example, two vintages that were cold and wet and two that are from exceedingly hot and dry vintages, and see if there are patterns that develop. Another great little exercise is an attempt to make an assessment of the relative ageworthiness of two different producer’s wines, starting let’s say with some of the “middle-aged” vintages and working backwards in time to see who “cracks” first, i.e. are is there a rough number of years from the vintage date at which a producer’s wines begin to “slide”…is the decline for the other producer similar in character or different?

As I intimated in beginning this piece, building verticals takes time, money, and space, but if one has a bit of all three, there is little else in wine that I know that so deftly points up the “analyzable” aspects of wine appreciation. So if you’ve got some greenbacks burning a hole in your Haband slacks, and haven’t yet gotten into the vertical game, identify your champions, and make your move. Once you get a taste of drinking and comparing verticals, you’ll be glad that you discovered this “advanced” wine drinking activity.

TOM CIOCCO