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The question
When you list a wine as having a cellaring period of two to 10 years, does that period start at the date on the bottle or the date of your article?
The answer
It starts with the review's publication date, not the wine's vintage date.
Wines do, indeed, begin to evolve the moment they finish fermenting. But most wine writers, myself included, intend for their cellaring recommendations to refer to the wine at the time it was tasted, not produced or bottled. This becomes obvious when a critic uses an expression such as "drink now until 2020." Obviously "now" refers to the present, not to the bottling date, which of course took place in the past. Make sense?
That said, the cellar-date guessing game is hardly exact science. There usually is a substantial margin of error. Much depends on storage conditions as well as peculiarities of the vintage.
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