This is a question out of the fairy tale past, from another country and another time. It is more relevant in cool climates where wine develops slowly for six months of the year in temperatures rarely experienced in Australia.

It is not a question uppermost in the minds of a mobile population which expects to shift their place of residence shortly.

It is also a question more relevant to a situation where the wine has been made from the same varieties, in the same way, for ages and ages, and there is very little new and exciting to try.

It's also a question for the rich and idle who have the time or the staff to keep a cellar book, have inherited a castle with a dungeon, and enjoy producing a dusty bottle to the engage the querulous gaze of their guests, don't mind losing a proportion of their cellar to lousy corks, or an inappropriate decision based on the advice of someone who didn't really know, or had an urgent and overwhelming need to sell the product quickly.

If you are going to have a cellar do it properly. Rust, Austria.

It is my experience that the very good wines taste that way from the beginning. If it seems too aggressive now, in context with food, then, it will probably always taste that way. I well remember tasting Petrus at the cellar, the young wine drawn from wood at the end of a two year exposure to same and it was delicious. The fruit characters were so positive that the wood had made very little impact. The corollary is that, if it doesn't taste very nice now it will, with the possible exception of Semillon, not taste any better with time.

It's also a question for the wine investors, and since I believe that the whole issue is so full of hype, silliness and manipulation I will not answer for them.

All that said, let me offer this guide as a careful observer of the wines that we have made in the past. I do not share the opinions of some who have drunk our wines from the early eighties and pronounced them wonderful. These were, in my view, textbook wines made with too much concern for pH levels and reflecting the fact that in those days we did not know what we know now.

Fortifieds like Fortis, Fortissimo, Pale Gold and Garnet are indestructible.

Fuchsia is well protected by its carbon dioxide content and becomes more estery and interesting for five or six years.

Semillon definitely cellars well. The least promising simple little wine from an over cropped and over vigorous vineyard can blossom in six years into a drink of great aromatic intensity and lovely integrated flavours. This comment applies to our off dry Semillon Verdelho and the blend Marrime.

Shiraz lives well in the bottle and I have enjoyed its mid palate fruit intensity, and its funky, of the soil nose, for a decade. I won't promise more at this stage.

Cabernet Merlot and Merlot from Dunsborough are enjoyed at their best at between three and five years of age. From 1991 onwards the wines are much more intense as we reined in the cropping level and gave them much more skin contact. All reds should be decanted for some hours (up to 24) prior to consumption.

Preservative Free Red lives. As I write in July 99, the 94 is simply delicious.

Good bottles of the 91 Chardonnay are nectar. That was Dunsborough fruit from a good year. Others have drunk variably and I would recommend consumption in the first five years. I believe that the Karridale fruit which chimes in from 98 onwards will establish a new benchmark standard for durability and deliciousness.

The Late Picked Verdelho is a wine that I will have to look at. No comment because, at this stage, very little observation. I'll have to organize a retrospective.

Erl Happ July 99