There are plenty of ways to make the most of a bottle of wine: with the perfect meal at home, out at your favorite restaurant, with family or with close friends. But there’s no substitute for giving a suitable wine the opportunity to age. That’s not to say that every wine should be aged — far from it, in fact.

Most wines these days are made to be consumed in their youth. But a properly aged wine provides something that can’t possibly be simulated in the winemaking process, with a decanter, or by using any gimmick or gadget.

There’s been a dramatic push over the past decade or two for winemakers to create super-plush, dense, extracted red wines, with soft tannins and generous amounts of oak that serve to make a wine highly approachable in its youth. White wines have been pushed to greater levels of ripeness, and consequently the occasional raging alcohol content.

There’s been so much emphasis on  making sleek, immediately approachable wines that it has forced classically made, well-balanced varieties to the sidelines. From Australia and California in the New World to the classic Old World wine-growing regions of Bordeaux and Rhone Valley in France and Tuscany and Piedmont in Italy, a growing number of winemakers are doing everything they can to make their wines as drinkable as possible upon release. But the almost inevitable tradeoff is longevity; without ample acid or tannin, it’s difficult for a wine to age gracefully, and all of the exuberant fruit that can be so appealing in a young wine tends to disappear before the oak has a chance to integrate into the wine.

Read the full article here written by Jeff Bramwell, co-owner of The Raleigh Wine Shop, as it appeared in the spring 2012 issue of Wake Living Magazine.