A special anniversary, such as a silver, ruby or golden wedding anniversary, calls for an additional special Wine Gift, & selecting the right option can often be difficult & time consuming. An ideal solution, leading to a gift that is not only prestigious but also highly personal & thoughtful, is a vintage wine from the corresponding year. Vintage wines are rightly regarded as being sophisticated gifts with an air of exclusivity attached, but they also provide a direct connection to the year being commemorated, sharing as they do the same year of origin. The vintage wine gift can be enjoyed as the centrepiece of the celebration, or saved as a keepsake for the future.
Plenty of potential purchasers of a Vintage Wine gift are however discouraged by their lack of experience of vintage wines, fearful perhaps of choosing the wrong option. It is the aim of both this article & the brother article
Choosing the Ideal Anniversary Wine Gift to dispel any doubts that you may have by providing all the knowledge you require to start to explore the choices available for your vintage wine anniversary gift. Whereas the companion article deals with the more general choice of an anniversary wine for any year, here they will concentrate on the specific options open to you for special anniversaries taking place in the year 2010.
Some Thoughts on Wine Styles & Vintages
Perhaps the most important thing to note as you embark on your choice of a vintage wine gift for your special anniversary is that you will never err, provided you pay due consideration to the tastes of your recipient. Vintage wines are, by definition, wines that have established a pleasant reputation through tastings & favourable reviews & so have stood the check of time & found themselves in the cellars & inventories of discerning vintage wine merchants. The weaker & more insipid wines, & those that are fundamentally not suited to long term storage, are usually rooted out & won’t become established. So rest assured that, in settling on a vintage wine gift, you are already firmly on the path to a memorable gift that will be treasured.
You will note that here I have not emphasised a choice between red & white wines. This is because, as a general rule, white wines are not suited to long term ageing & are usually past their best after to years in bottle. There can be exceptions, such as some sweet desert wines of Sauternes for example, but for the beginner to vintage wines looking for a wine at least0 years elderly & usually much older, white wines are best avoided.
This said, it is also worth going that additional mile to make sure the gift is as well suited as feasible to the tastes of the recipient. If feasible, find out a tiny about their tastes in wine or other alcoholic drinks. Would they prefer a sweet or a dry style? Have they got a crooked to prefer fruity & bold wines? The more you can establish at this early stage, the more likely it is that your gift will delight.