What is Vintage Wine?
The word "vintage", in the context of vintage wine, is one of the most commonly misused descriptions to trip lightly off the tongues of wine buffs, worldwide.
Vintage has connotations of being something rather special, a luxury that is decidedly up-market, or possibly a wine that has been painstakingly nurtured and aged for many years.
So, let's set the record straight, once and for all. We need to define the real meaning of the word vintage as an adjective used for describing wine. Perhaps a good starting point is to clarify what vintage is not:
For a start, vintage is not a uniform description for wine that is necessarily top quality. It may well refer to a quality wine; on the other hand, some utterly undrinkable specimens may also be vintage wines.
Nor is the term vintage, on a wine label, any guarantee of excellence. To put it bluntly, there is nothing remotely reassuring about the word vintage emblazoned across the label of your inexpensive supermarket "find"!
Nor does vintage refer to a specific type of wine produced by a particular estate or a wine from a defined wine-growing region.
So, what exactly is vintage wine? The answer is simple:
Definition of vintage wine
Vintage wine means wine that is produced from a single year's grape harvest, or simply the wine of a single year.
The term vintage is used to describe the annual grape harvest. In other words, if the year in which a wine is produced is shown on the label, then the wine is vintage wine - nothing more, nothing less.
When wines from different years or vintages are blended together, then the end product can no longer be described as vintage wine.
And, herein lies the irony. The term blend is often viewed in derogatory terms, as a wine that is potentially inferior. Nothing, in fact could be further from the truth; we only have to think of champagne, that most illustrious of wine blends and the most coveted sparkling wine blend, in the world.