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My dining companion looked up from the wine list, perplexed. “But it’s supposed to be a great vintage.”

“Yes, it is. Which is why you shouldn’t order it.”

He dropped the list on the table, exasperated. “Did anyone ever tell you that you make very little sense?”

“Sure, all the time.” But on this issue, at least, I had a point.

Vintage is one of the least-understood aspects of wine. Everyone knows what it means on a label: the grapes were harvested in such-and-such a year. And most everyone thinks they know what it means in the glass. Self-evidently, the good vintages are better than the bad ones. Right?

Not necessarily. First of all, it might help to understand what goes into a vintage assessment. It’s mostly about the weather. Was it hot? Cold? Dry? Was there hail that damaged the vines? Frost that injured the grapes? A deluge at harvest? All these factors matter, because they affect the way in which the grape’s various components 1) ripen, and 2) balance with each other, which forms the chemistry of the grape…and thus, the taste of the wine.

When most people say a vintage was “great,” they mean that it was relatively dry and unusually warm. This is thinking based on historical Old World viticulture, in which the best years were those where the grapes were able to ripen, perfectly and without interruption. In an average year, that wasn’t usually the case…and in a bad year, there might not be any wine at all. But that’s the past. “Thanks” to global warming (and improved farming), truly bad vintages are virtually nonexistent, and much of what’s currently considered average would have been acclaimed as recently as fifty years ago.

In much of the New World, it’s exactly the opposite. Many – perhaps most – New World regions enjoy climates for which Europeans of a century ago would have bartered their firstborn. So are the hotter, drier vintages still considered the best? It depends very much on who you ask. Many vintners in such areas actually prefer cooler years, and their goal is to slow down and lengthen ripening, believing – correctly – that it leads to more complex wines.

Hot grapes are sugary grapes, which leads to high alcohol. Hot grapes tend towards simple-minded fruit. The wines that result tend to be big, dumb doofuses (doofii?), full of immediate jam-like pleasure, but providing little else. Tannin can also be excessive in hot vintages. This is the primary fault of many European reds from 2003, a year of unparalleled heat in which many vines simply gave up, stopped growing, and waited for Mother Nature to turn on the air conditioning…which, in some regions, she never did.

But these are things that concern the winemaker. What about you, the person who’s going to have to drink all this meteorological data?

First, it’s worth stressing that a vintage assessment is a generalization. The most important qualitative factor for a wine is still, and always will be, the producer. Some will overachieve, others will underachieve, and vintage is in no way a foolproof indicator of results. And so, to generalize…

The “great” years tend to need aging. That’s need. Full of powerful structure that can obscure much of what’s going to be great, these are bottles to lay down and forget for years, and sometimes decades. It’s not that they can’t be appealing in their youth, it’s that they’re a mere shadow of what they’ll eventually become. Wine folk have a word for premature uncorkulation: infanticide. Extreme, yes, but wine nuts take their babies seriously.

Top vintages are also expensive. And why wouldn’t they be? Everyone who believes they’re great will want to own them, driving demand through the roof. This is an effect that is magnified over time, which is why such absurd prices are paid for older wines (almost always great vintages) at auction. Your average oenophile billionaire will have a cellar stocked with only the greatest years. And why not, if they can afford it? But the rest of us need a different strategy.

Wines from less acclaimed vintages tend to be cheaper, certainly, but they also tend to be more accessible in their youth. Maybe they’re not going to age as long, and thus are “ready” sooner, or maybe the winemaker saw their more limited potential early in the process, and took deliberate steps to make what they could from the materials at hand. In either case, for the non-billionaires among us, these are the smart buys in a restaurant setting: cheaper, easier to drink, and providing more of what the wine can accomplish at an earlier time in its life.

Which isn’t to say that one should ignore the great vintages, only that a steady diet of them gets very expensive and requires a great deal of patience. And a big cellar, or at least a wallet fat enough to mimic one on a whim. Plus, what are you going to do while waiting for the great vintages to mature? Watch the Weather Channel?

(First published in stuff@night, 2008.)