Kalin Wine and when wine is ready

When I was up in Oregon a few weeks ago, I went to a cool tasting at a winery called Antica Terra. The tasting was unique in the fact that the winemaker gave us 9 wines, 3 of which she made and 6 of which she didn't. When was the last time you went to a winery and a winemaker tried to sell you someone else's wine? She shares wines not made by her to show customers what wines inspire her. Some of them were absolutely astounding and some of them were simply controversial. Of the controversial sort was a Sauvignon Blanc made by a producer called Kalin Cellars that looked like this...



As you can tell by the color, it's not your typical sauvignon blanc. It's a 2001 wine that was just released this year. It flies in the face of all common wine wisdom that sauvignon blanc should be consumed within the first few years of vintage. That's because Kalin Cellars is known for producing wine and then holding it until it is "optimal" to drink. This approach came out of the owners point of view that Americans are drinking wine too young and losing out. Kalin Cellars believes that by only selling wine when it's ready, the owners are stopping "people from committing infanticide." The man and his wines are clearly colorful characters.

Besides the fact that Kalin wines taste absolutely unique due to the aging, it prompts an interesting question of when are wines ready and how do we know? If you buy a good bottle of wine, you can generally find out how long you're supposed to keep it. It might say "good to drink now but will improve over the next X-Y years". The only way to know that optimal point is to try it every now and then (through Coravin or multiple bottles) to see when you like it most. However, Kalin Cellars takes that to the extreme and holds wine way past the point where most people would say it's good. These wines remain drinkable (but highly polarizing...you can ask Katie McGee, I forced her to drink one), even though most wineries would have written them off already. This only makes me further question the value of the critic. If we can't agree on when wines are good for drinking (now, 5 years, 20 years) and what good wines taste like, how do we ever know the quality of a wine?