Wine · Terminology

Vertical tasting

Tasting several vintages of the same wine, to isolate vintage variation and ageing.

A vertical tasting compares several vintages of the same wine. Producer, site and (broadly) winemaking are held constant, so what you are tasting is the growing season and the effect of age — the two things a single bottle can never show you on its own.

It is the fastest way to learn what a wine's maturity curve looks like, and the only reliable way to develop a feel for how much a vintage matters in a given region.

In practice

  • Three vintages teach a little; six to ten teach a great deal.
  • Serve youngest to oldest as a rule — though many tasters reverse it to give the fragile old bottles a fresh palate.
  • Old bottles need care: stand them up in advance, and decide bottle by bottle whether to decant.
  • Note the colour as carefully as the nose. Bricking rims and deepening gold are the visual half of the story.

Where you'll meet it

  • Producer-hosted tastings and library releases.
  • Auction previews, where condition and ullage vary bottle to bottle.
  • Any serious study of Bordeaux, Burgundy or vintage Champagne.

What a vertical actually reveals

  1. The house style — the through-line that survives every vintage.
  2. Vintage character — the hot years, the wet ones, the cool late-picked ones, all in the same glass shape.
  3. The ageing curve — where fruit gives way to bouquet, and where a wine stops improving.
  4. Bottle variation — the quiet lesson: two bottles of the same old vintage can differ more than two adjacent vintages.

Running one well

  • Group by decade if the range is wide, and taste in flights of four or five.
  • Give the old wines room. They can need an hour in the glass, or fall apart in fifteen minutes; watch them rather than pouring on a schedule.
  • Keep records. A vertical is most valuable as a baseline you return to in five years.

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