Planning and aging wines – especially reds, is very important. Some people do plan ahead to age the wines they make, giving a greater value for the money they spend. Over the years we have come to recognize the buying patterns of many of our regulars. Most do not build a stock up – and without a stock, we know that the next kit you get will be consumed prior to passing the "chateau yesterday" phase.
Someone might come in the store and regale us with the latest bottle they opened – maybe a nice KenRidge Showcase Australian Shiraz and remark how good it is. Then they describe that it had just been bottled two weeks ago! All we can say is "imagine how good it will be in a few months time!"
But of course, this comes down to the fact that if you want a bottle of red with dinner, you have to drink what you have. If you have no stock aging, then ‘chateau yesterday’ is the only choice.
Think about it like this – you couldn’t go to the store and buy a 2 week old bottle of Cabernet – they just don’t sell them that young. Its common knowledge amoungst producers that even 3 or 6 months aging provides sufficient time to allow the real character of your wine to start shining through.
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In other news, we sometimes get people looking for screw on caps for wine bottles. This is related to the MLCC selling increasingly more wines that come in screw cap bottles. In order to reuse them, you often need to keep the cap (a practice that isn’t going to produce a good seal) since its so hard to find good replacement caps.
We’ve looked ourselves for a vendor that supplies caps, but the best we could find required a very high order – to the tune of tens of thousands of caps as a minimum.
Therefore we ask our customers that if you do find a place that sells replacement screw caps for wine bottles, let us know at info@moonshiners.mb.ca!