When tasting wine, knowing the vintage of the wine can make for a very enjoyable tasting experience. Whether you’re tasting a full bodied red wine, or a dry white wine, good wines, fine wines, or cheap wines; the vintage can tell you a lot about the grape that went into the wine, and therefore what the vintage wine will taste like.
Vintage wine tasting is also the way the experts analyze vintages of different fine wine makers. Red wines and white wines are analyzed according to their vintage. Vintage wines are analyzed by taste, and expert tasters create taste charts to rank and analyze the wines. These tasting, or vintage, charts are made by independent tasters for red wine and white wine so that customers can choose the good fine wines they would like to drink, without having to taste the thousands of vintage wines created every year.
When tasting a good wine or cheap wine, pay close attention to characteristics that pertain to the vintage of the fine wine you are drinking. Good fine wines from the same winery will taste similar to other bottles from that same winery and from the same vintage. Whether drinking red wine or white wine, this will allow you to shop for cheap good wine and know that it will taste the same as the bottle you just finished tasting. Vintage wines that are ranked by independent tasters also help customers choose which fine red or white wine they will be tasting at home.
The oldest 100+ point vintage wine is an 1811 bottle of D’Yquem. In the U.S., such a fine bottle of red wine could fetch a good price well over $70,000 USD for a single bottle. The point system is assigned by experienced wine tasters who assign the vintage points to fine red and white wines around the world. It’s a way of ranking vintage wines based on taste. A high vintage point rating would let a buyer know that 1811 was a very good vintage year for the particular grapes used in producing that old bottle of wine, without the owner having to open the fine wine for tasting.