Wine 101: When is VINTAGE important?

Vintages are mostly important for more ‘premium’ wines; For ‘regular’ wines (I would say below RM60 a bottle), the modern winemaking technics now allow winemakers to produce very decent wines regardless of the vintages conditions, especially with the weather (drought or too much rain, disease attacks, etc.). For premium wines, the work is more drastic in the vineyards to get the best & most intense grapes production. Too much rain may make the vines to produce too much grapes, where the juice will be like ‘diluted’; not enough rain and the production will be very small, and very concentrated. Many ‘New World’ countries are actually too hot and need to have controlled irrigation, so they can control the exact production. In France, for example, irrigation is mostly forbidden for the highest AOC classification, unless, for exceptional situations. So French wines – and Europeans wines in general – are more prone to have big difference between vintages. So for Bordeaux for example, the last decade have produced some outstanding vintages (2000, 05, 09, 10), but also some more classic (2001, 06, 07, 11). 2003 was a complicated vintage with a massive drought season which caused very small crops and complex wines; 2012 was very bad, and many wineries will not even be selling their cuvées! So check the vintages for the more expensive wines, and for the more ‘simple’ wines, keep it as ‘the younger the better’.