In a recent article about how wine ages, Kelli A. White admits to having a predilection for decay. Her favorite foods? “Stinky cheese, dry-aged beef, and mushrooms—the very agents of decomposition,” she writes. “Wines that taste of cherries and oranges are far too easy,” she adds, saying that she prefers “ the earthy flavors of wisdom and experience.” 

In her long career as a sommelier and educator (she’s currently Director of Education for the Wine Center at Meadowood in the Napa Valley), she’s spent decades paying attention to wines as they senesce. That led to her first book, Napa Then & Now, in which she not only plumbed Napa’s vinous history, she documented in exhaustive tasting notes hundreds of older wines from some of Napa’s greatest producers.

White covers many topics in her new book, Wine Confident, a comprehensive and instructive manual on how to appreciate wine. Naturally, that includes a chapter on collecting older wines, which starts with the question every wine collector on earth is dying to know the answer to: “How do I know when to drink it?” 

Her answer? “There is no one instant of peak maturity, no apex of perfection where all the elements of the wine align in symphonic harmony and kittens and angels and babies come tumbling out of the bottle.”

Still, White had much to share about how to appreciate older wine, and knowing a bit about what to expect from your older bottles is a key to their enjoyment.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

The Unicorn Review: You worked the front of the house at Veritas in Manhattan, with its almost mythically deep cellar of old wines. Is that where you developed your knowledge of older wines?

Kelli White: It was a huge learning curve for me, and I faced the classic sommelier's dilemma—you might be able to try every dish on the menu, but you can't sit down and try every wine on the list. You might not have experience with what you are supposed to be selling and guiding people toward. But you educate yourself and talk to your colleagues who are telling you, "This is still really good." You keep tasting wines as you open them, you confirm, you adjust, you refine your approach, you become familiar with the way things should taste.

I was reading like a madwoman—Broadbent [Michael Broadbent, M.W., Great Vintage Wine Book, with 6,000 tasting notes] and Clive Coates M.W. on Burgundy [the in-depth “Côte d’Or”]. Eventually I could recommend older Bordeaux because I felt confident that those wines could age, then older red Burgundy, and then the northern Rhône. But it took a while before I had the confidence to recommend the super old stuff.

For those who don’t work in a restaurant with a deep cellar, what’s the best way to develop your palate?

I think there are two ways to figure out your palate vis-à-avis old wine. There's the slow way, which is less capital intensive, and then there's the fast, expensive way. 

The slow way is to find wines that you like, which you've maybe tasted while they're on the younger side, and then just age alongside them. Ideally, you buy a whole case and open a bottle in two years, and then in five years, and then ten years. And you pay attention—you take notes, and compare these notes to your old notes. You're paying attention to the wine, but you’re also paying attention to how you're responding to the wine. That's the slow way. 

The fast way is to either purchase wines at auction and pull corks, or go to restaurants with deep wine lists, which are fewer and further between these days. Hopefully, the restaurant has an educated staff who knows how to handle corks, how to recognize flaws that you might not be aware of. And if the wine is just totally dead, you may not have to share the financial burden. Whereas if you buy something at auction, that's it.

How do I even know what I like? 

If you're just trying to figure out what your tolerance for old wine is after drinking nothing but new releases, opening a 50-year-old wine is probably going to be a jarring experience. So I would say a good place to start is to open a wine that's 10 years old. I think you’ll get a good feel for the journey, at least in some sense. 

Even after just 10 years, you’ll start to feel a little of the softening or mellowing of the aromatics. They get a little more integrated, a little bit less overt, if that makes sense. Pay attention to whether you like it better or worse than the new release version. Try that a couple of times, and if you're like, “I like the other thing better,” then that's great. But if you’re intrigued by the old wine, then it’s time to try something even older.

Walk us down the path of a wine you’ve been following in your cellar.

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I bought a couple of cases of 2011 Tyrrell’s Semillon [from Australia’s Hunter Valley], a wine known for longevity. I still have some bottles, and I open them every so often. And I swear, every time I open one I think, “Is this going to be the last good bottle?” And every time, the answer is, “Absolutely not!” That wine has miles to go, it’s evolving way more slowly than I would ever have imagined. It still has that little kiss of green fleck in the hue that Semillon sometimes gets, and really juicy fruit that’s rounded out by this other stuff, a complexity that is just so thrilling.

But you have to remember that your palate is also changing. I've probably changed more in 10 years than this wine has. I'm a mom now. I'm pretty tired. I'm not spending the amount of time I would have to prepare an occasion to open that wine. Not long ago it would have been like, “What are we cooking? What's the mood? Let's really savor it.” Now I’m kicking a vacuum cord  across the floor and half-chugging it between chores. So my relationship to that wine has changed. And that’s what's exciting about having a relationship with a wine, marking its evolution. But also marking my evolution, right? Both things are happening. 

Sometimes it’s a reminder of how much has changed since you first had that wine, like a time machine to remember what you were like the first time you tried it. I find the whole process absolutely psychologically grounding in a way that's not purely nostalgic, like that feeling when you catch up with an old friend you haven't talked to in a couple years, and you just feel so damn understood. It can be like that. 

What do you recommend for collectors to cultivate their palate memory?

I think writing things down is extraordinarily helpful. It can be just four or five words—how good it was, or if it fell apart after four or five minutes. My advice to people when communicating about wine, even to themselves, is don't get hung up on established wine language. Instead, write yourself a shorthand, something you know that you will understand. You don't have to worry about anybody else understanding it in 20 years. 

A lot of old-school collectors have a cellar book where they actually write notes. That might not be practical for some people, but you can have a spreadsheet, or use cellartracker.com, things like that. There are apps where you can take a picture and upload the information (though I don’t know what happens to that data when those apps go away).

I think the best practice for cultivating a palate memory is to be present with the wine. I know this sounds a little woo-woo, but you have to teach yourself to be an active drinker. Because sometimes, even with great wines, you're just like, “Ooh, this is so good,” and then you move on to the next wine or the next thought or the next day. But if you take the discipline to stop, tune out the world for a minute and commune with the wine, you’ll be creating an entry in your brain that you can access later, either through memory or emotion.

For some people, probably the joy of a glass of old wine is simply how good it tastes, and that's enough. But for the rest of us, we spend part of our lives trying to find ways to write and communicate about how and why this beverage moves us. I think for me, older wine is almost like a portal to these bigger thoughts, thoughts that you might not initially pin to wine. And yet, I think they’re there, if you’re looking.

Next month, Part II—a look at some of those "big thoughts."