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It looks like no one has said this yet. Many of the higher price/quality wines are expected to be cellared for a certain number of years after release. Opened too soon, they will have too much tannin and/or acidity. It costs money to keep wines under the correct conditions. One thing that drives up the price of a bottle is whether someone else already did this for you. A 2014 Bordeaux right now, on average, will cost…
Yes that's another factor. For the cheaper wines (pretty much anything you can get in a grocery store), they're made to be opened immediately and don't really benefit from aging. But the higher end wines need to be aged. One of the fun things is that you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage. So there are online forums where people will buy a case and open one bottle a year and…
This is actually the first year in a long time that I have a batch aging -- using wild grapes growing on my property. The first wine I ever made (from a kit), unbeknownst to me, needed to be aged to taste good. Once I learned that, I did the same test: every few months I'd open a bottle and taste it. After a year, most of the "tarry" flavors were gone, after 3 it was getting good. At five I really liked it. Unfortunately, no bottles survived to the 10-year mark, but I did learn to make wines that matured a lot faster!
