For my wedding I received a very welcome gift from a dear friend: a bottle of Sassicaia 2015, elected best wine in the world by Wine Spectator in 2018.

“You will open this for your son’s 18th birthday” he told us. For the record, the wedding took place last year and there is still no mention of children, so the date still remains suspended in time.

As already mentioned in a previous article, wine is “alive” food and each bottle has its own life cycle with maturation and decay phases that can be very different from one wine to another.

What’s the big difference?

The presence of elements that naturally help the wine to be preserved and therefore to mature over time, namely sugars, acids and tannins. On the basis of their quantity, the duration of life can be estimated. Let’s leave out the sulphites, partly naturally present but very often added.

However, the question remains open. When to open the bottle?

Even consulting some renowned e-commerce sites, I was unable to get a precise answer, between more or less long time intervals: one of these indicates 2020-2032, another has gone up to 2042!

There is no magical moment in which we can be sure that the wine is ready: it is certainly not like cooking pasta, in which we know the cooking minutes and above all we have the opportunity to taste it during the process.

But perhaps this is also the beauty. The goal is certainly to be able to enjoy the wine when it has clearly expressed all its aromatic potential but also the emotion of not knowing what to expect from the bottle when opening it is part of the game and is the reason why many wine lovers buy more bottles of the same type to open at different times.

In my case, unless there is a sudden frenzy, I will wait until the next decade.