A Glut of Old Fine Wines Is Available for the Drinking Now
Skip buying young and cellaring. Aged wine by the bottle and the glass is more accessible than ever.
William Koch’s wine cellar in Palm Beach.
Photographer: William Jess Laird/Christies
A couple of summers ago, driving back to New York from Maine, I stopped for dinner at Ledger, in Salem, Massachusetts. It’s a large, tourist-friendly restaurant in a former bank building, serving up good New England fare, a broad range of local craft beer and cocktails with names such as Devilish Diva.
It also, surprisingly, has a sommelier, who offered me a glass of 2017 Fiano, a grape native to Campania, Italy. You can spend a lot of time drinking Italian wines before you find any Fiano; when you do, it will almost always be young and fresh, like most coastal whites. But it also ages beautifully, and this particular glass, with hints of chamomile and saffron, was revelatory.