Yes, You Should Be Cellaring Your Natural Wines

The hazier wine bottles in your collection deserve the white glove treatment, too.

With its relatively youthful following and easygoing energy, it's not hard to view natural wine as fundamentally at odds with the wine collector culture of yore. According to 2023 surveys, nearly 90% of wine purchased in the U.S. is consumed within 24 hours of purchasing, and 95%, within the week — which is to say, while natural wine thrives, cellaring, once fundamental to wine culture, has become something of a lost art.

Antiquated as the whole collector shtick may seem (picture Dennis Quaid blowing dust from his wedding year vintage in The Parent Trap, or James Bond waxing poetic about Dom Perignon ‘53 in Goldfinder), perhaps it’s a more tragic loss than we realize.

“Aging wine is a necessary exercise if you really want to get under the skin of something. You can’t really know the whole story of a bottle if you’ve never aged it,” says Isabelle Legeron, France’s first female Master of Wine, and founder of wildly popular international natural wine fair, RAW WINE. “Imagine if you abandoned all of your friendships after the first year, when you’d begun having deeper, more intense, revelatory conversations. That would mean you’d hardly known those people at all, no? The same goes for a great bottle of wine.”

Related: Wine Pros Share How They Store Their Favorite Bottles at Home

In reality, so many wines we love — natural wines, included — get more complex over time. They’re three-dimensional characters. They mature; balance themselves out; shift as their tannins soften. “Speaking personally, I age wines because I love the journey of taste. I love to witness the evolution that happens inside a bottle over time,” Legeron adds.

Given that so few among us have surplus apartment square footage for essentials, let alone temperature-controlled racks of Sancerre, it's not exactly surprising that cellaring is a low priority. And with the mainstream-ification of natural wine, many of us (city-dwellers in particular) have been sold on the myth that low-intervention bottles are designed to be opened young. Au contraire: “If we’re talking about wines made with little-to-no sulfites, specifically, the bacteria in the bottle is still alive. Obviously, the yeast mostly is mostly dead, but there’s a form of microbiology that’s carrying on,” says Legeron. “That means the wine is still living, still developing into something else. That can make it even more exciting to age than a conventional wine.”

The consumption of organic wine in the U.S. has increased nearly 20% per year since 2020 — and the millennial market share has grown substantially, too. But, in a demographic well adjusted to instant-gratification, it makes sense that cellaring has fallen off as a trend. Think about it: Rarely do we watch the thirty-second video when there’s a 10-second option available…so the prospect of waiting, say, ten years, to open up a bottle feels downright obscene. “We don’t really have the time to respect the totality of things, anymore. We’re all in a hurry,” says Tynan Pierce, who helms Antica Terra’s The Collective, a wine club designed to introduce exciting, rare, often-aged bottles to folks who do not necessarily have cellars, themselves. “But in a world where everything feels so fleeting, there’s also some comfort in watching the ways a wine can hold up over decades. Is every bottle you age going to be life-changing and personality-altering in a delicious way? Maybe not. But, are they at least going to be challenging, and unique and thought-provoking in a way that young wines just cannot be? I certainly believe so.”

Related: Organic vs. Biodynamic vs. Natural Wine—What's the Difference?

Of course, there are a number of “glou glou” bottles intended for early consumption — fresh, low-alcohol, easy-drinking wines, named onomatopoetically for the sound made when one chugs directly from a bottle. Often, these wines lack the structure to mature for lengthy periods of time. But that doesn’t mean they’re low quality — just that they’ve been engineered for a different purpose.

According to Zev Rovine, whose importing company, eponymously titled Zev Rovine Selections, distributes one of the largest natural wine books in the country, it’s worth noting that glou glou is only one small portion of the natural wine landscape. “I import bottles from about 350 wineries, and I’d say the vast majority of them will age well. Some of these producers have bottles from the ‘20s that are absolutely spectacular — and others, like Meinklang for example, are making bottles intentionally crafted to be consumed within the next few years. You can still absolutely cellar them…just not forever,” he explains.

That distinction is important: If you think of aged, refined bottles like canonical literature — Proust, for example — then Meinklang is a beach read. The Austrian producer’s wines are accessible and un-intimidating, in a way that helps to usher in new drinkers (call them “gateway wines”). That’s an essential role to play. But, at the same time, the popularity of the glou glou genre certainly doesn’t render older bottles unhip or passé, either. “You know, when you’re at a natural wine party, or a bar takeover, if you come out with, say, a 1989 Ganavet Chardonnay, you’ll be the man,” says Rovine. “Seriously, the whole room will freak out.”

When it comes to identifying wines you do wish to age, then, it can be difficult to make definitive judgment calls. The planet is fickle: Some vintages will age better than others, even within identical regions. Weather will ravage wines, droughts will strike, faulty corks will destroy cases. And whether you’re a zero-zero evangelist or a believer in the fact that a bit of sulfur dioxide is entirely worthwhile when bottling wines, any low-intervention vintage will be riskier than one made with chemical-stabilized fermentation. Which is to say, it can all feel like a shot in the dark.

How to tell if a wine can be aged

According to Legeron, all determinations of aging start with your palate. “We don’t often talk about texture as much as flavor when we’re discussing wines, but you’ll typically want to age something that has structure, or bite. Something that sits heavy with you while you taste it. Likely, something with a higher ABV” she advises.

We can also rely on the hard, fast evidence of a winemaker’s practices to determine what feels worth stowing away. “If we’re talking about a producer I love, with really great, sturdy grape farming practices, and a lot of craft and know-how, then I’ll just trust my gut and buy and age as many vintages as I can,” says Trevor Kellogg, buyer and owner at Discovery Wines, one of Manhattan’s most comprehensive natural wine shops.

Related: What Exactly Is a Pét-Nat?

For legacy producers in regions like Chianti and Bordeaux, aging is an easy call —  we have decades, even centuries of evidence proving certain bottles will hold up over time. But for first generation winemakers, especially those avoiding chemical additives, aging is a more intimidating game. “No wine is bulletproof. We can’t know for sure what anything will taste like down the line, until we’ve tasted it,” says Maggie Harrison, the winemaker and head honcho at Antica Terra, a low-intervention winery based in Willamette Valley, Oregon with allocations so low and lauded, Michelin-starred restaurant are clamoring for access to bottles. “But we do know that the way we’re making natural wines today is the same way that wildly talented producers were making wines 50 or even 100 years ago — and so we can trust in that fact, whether or not we have proof just yet.”

At a recent dinner, while pouring wine, Harrison says she was asked how one of her bottles would age. “I just shrugged,” she admits. “I’m a first generation winemaker and I'm at the very edge of my empirical evidence. All I know right now is that the first vintages of wine that we made are better today than they were on release. But I have no idea what happens tomorrow.”

It’s worth mentioning, however, that delayed gratification is not always a virtue. For seasoned collectors, over-aging is indeed a valid fear. “I’ve definitely heard buyers say they waited too long to open a beautiful wine — which is sad, because these winemakers put their heart and soul into these bottles, and they certainly didn’t intend for them to be put away and forgotten,” says Vanessa Conlin, Sotheby’s global head of wine retail. “I’m always encouraging collectors to watch inventory maturity. I mean, you can't take your bottles with you when you go, natural or otherwise — so at some point, you’ve just got to wait for the right quote-unquote occasion to open something.”

And while sure, the practice of aging natural wine comes with no hard and fast guarantees, nor does, say, Bitcoin. Or Prozac. Or friendship, for that matter. And there’s some poetic justice in waiting out a particular vintage’s coming-of-age phase, bolstered by nothing but blind faith.“It’s a little like looking at old photos. There’s something embarrassing about seeing younger versions of yourself, with bad glasses, or braces. It’s you, but less fully formed,” says Harrison. “But listen, I am not static, and neither is the wine I’m making. I can’t wait to meet me in ten years, and I can’t wait to taste my wine, either.”

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