Something about talking about old wines leads you down some pretty heady pathways. So it was in my conversation with Kelli A. White, most recently author of Wine Confident and one of our most articulate interpreters of old wines, with the experience, palate, and acuity to get at some of its mysteries, from the biochemical to the deeply personal.

This interview started with some practical advice for collectors. But as we kept talking, we found ourselves taking a very different tack, or several, as we explored some of the ambiguities and unanticipated pleasures of drinking older bottles.

This conversation was edited for clarity and concision.

The Unicorn Review: So if you love wine, do you have to love old wine too?

Kelli A. White: I just published this book [Wine Confident] that has this very, I would say, "You go girl!" vibe for wine. I want people to get rid of a lot of the anxiety and just relax and not be like, "Well, if it's not in a hand-blown Austrian stem, why even bother?" We, in the wine industry, at some point need to take a breath, just get back to basics and enjoy it.

In the course of writing the book, I was thinking a lot about why any of us should give a shit about wine. There are so many who dedicate our whole life to it. What is the "why" here? For me, as I'm getting older and considerably more sentimental, it's the experience of beauty in wine, of literally ingesting beauty.

What do you mean by "ingesting beauty?"

There are so many fundamentals in our appreciation of wine, about how it’s grown, how it reflects a sense of place, contributes to the economy, the farming... All that's great, but it's also about the history, the tradition, the human connection. I truly believe that without these really rare moments of connecting, of ingesting something unbelievably beautiful, we wouldn't be talking about any of the other stuff. And it's so much more likely to happen in an older wine.

Did you have an old wine epiphany? One that blew the lid off?

Yes. It was a 1975 Oenotheque from Dom Perignon. That wine blew my mind. I remember viscerally thinking, "How is this wine this old and this magnificent?"

This was at Veritas in 2009, so I was 29 years old. The wine was five years older than me. I resisted the idea that it was going to be any good, and I was scared to recommend it. My brain would have told you that it was probably going to taste old and pretty flat. Thankfully, the guest in this instance knew more than me.

It absolutely blew my mind. It was so dynamic and magnificent, with this incredible vibrancy of flavors, all this swirling complex chaos, all the sensory input was hitting on all notes of the spectrum. [It's like] when you're listening to a piece of classical music and you get to the main theme in the piece where all of the instruments in the orchestra are going all at once, the low horn instruments, the banging drums, the tinkling bells and the flutes and everything. That’s what old wine is like at a beautiful drinking window. It’s an overwhelming experience—physically, emotionally, sensorially, just, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!

Wow.

I know. That’s when I started to love older wine, and to explore and celebrate it. Every time I took another step back in time, or a side step to a different wine category, it was richly rewarding. I got more comfortable with older white Burgundy and older Riesling.

But I have to stress that we all have specific tastes in wine vis-a-vis age the same way we have specific tastes in music or food or art.

Being pregnant was very impactful in terms of my understanding of this idea of preference being something that is biologically guided. When I got pregnant I thought I was going to be one of these cool French ladies that drank a little wine every day, and I couldn't even smell the stuff. It was repulsive. So were some of my favorite foods. When I had the baby I thought I could go back to eating these things, but not everything returned.

Sometimes a personal preference is practically in your bones. And while I love older wine, I also want to put on a big old asterisk to indicate that that's just my preference. A lot of people prefer the fruit and the impact of younger wine, which is cool. I'm not trying to drown you in equivalences. My point is there's a context for each of those. I want to stop always ranking everything and start contextualizing everything.

One of the reasons I love older wine is the thing you brought up earlier, the human and historic connection. A few years ago I was lucky enough to tour the cellars of Lopez de Heredia in Rioja. For our lunch the proprietor, Mercedes Lopez de Heredia, pulled a bottle of Viña Tondonia from 1942. It remains one of the great wine experiences of my life. If you’ll indulge me, here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

“The experience was as uplifting as it was utterly fleeting, a half-hour’s grace of the sort that makes one glad to be alive to glimpse it, and wistful when it falls away. This wine was a repository of history: the person who had placed it in its crypt was long dead; when it had last been touched, the inhabitants of Haro were still reeling from the memories of fascism and civil strife, and enduring the trials of the greatest war they’d ever face, even as vintages moved on, impassive to hardship and deprivation, carrying the region and its reputation inexorably forward.”

Yes. There are so many ways to interpret these wines as they age, you have so many reference points. You can think about what was happening when this wine was born. You can contemplate the beautiful, well-earned autumnal flavors of age, as a badge of honor, a mark of what this wine has endured and how it’s evolved, if not improved. And it's amazing to witness that and participate and ingest that. And then you can also be hopeful, thinking about birth and beginnings and journeys and all that stuff. And then, of course, inevitably, you have to think about, "When will this no longer be enjoyable?" I’d say we're getting in some dark waters now.

That’s interesting you say that, because this wine did fall apart while we were drinking it. It had about 30 minutes of glory and then it just died. So what's going on when a wine falls apart like that?

I suspect it's just a rapid oxidation of some of the more fragile chemical compounds in the wine. Aging is a complex process, but the big driver is oxidation. So when your 1942 suddenly experiences a dramatic influx of oxygen, those protections—the antioxidant power of pigment and tannin, or phenolic density, or any residual sulfur dioxide—they fall away and the wine is simply more vulnerable, even when you’re just swirling it in a glass.

But there’s also something kind of beautiful about it. It’s a cool moment to catch a wine—you're sort of present for its last breath.

You’re describing almost a kind of mortality, which is a very human concept.

I would say yes. It really comes back to what we talked about in the beginning—why care about wine at all? Because it elicits an emotional reaction. The way I think about wine and relate to wine and describe wine is usually pretty anthropomorphic instead of analytical, even though I like to be analytical too.

I tend to think about wines as having human characteristics, traits like charm or reticence or grouchiness or nobility or shyness. This feels more universal to me than descriptors, you know, in the classic tasting note, but it’s also legitimately how I organize them in my own mind, like a cast of characters, these people you know, whom I'm interacting with. When I'm contemplating an older wine and what's happening to it, it feels like I am aware of that wine's mortality. And you can't help but contemplate mortality in general, including your own. I think it's good to not turn away from those things because you can ignore it, but you're still getting older and it's still coming for you, the pain and the poetry, whether you want to face it or not.

I’m a bit more old-fashioned in my thinking. We don't really fully understand the chemistry of wine aging and specifically the rate of individual components. We don't necessarily understand how fast or slow dimethyl sulfide will evolve and start to taste like black truffle. We don't necessarily know how fast or slow terpenes will denature. Specific components are operating on their own trajectory, so every wine is going to have its own arc.

But I've started to think that maybe the duration matters, because the thing that I love most about wine, beyond the pure esthetics of it, is its slowness. A wine has a lot to give over the course of an evening, or its lifetime. And I have come to believe that longevity matters, relative to different regions and grapes, of course. I don't want to get in the weeds on the specifics, but I think slowness matters. There's so little in life that is slow anymore.