Limits

Last night, on a whim, I opened an older bottle of the hard cider I make and discovered that it didn’t seem to have kept very well.  The “vintage” in question was the November 2003 “Kings X” bottling, nearly six years old, and the oldest bottle I’ve yet sampled.  (I have bottles laid down for every year from 1993 on;  so does the Empress, but hers are display bottles, laid down for archival purposes rather than consumption.)

I was surprised to find upon decanting that it didn’t smell so great, looked unusually dark and tasted mostly of alcohol, in a tangy, unpleasant way.  Some of that could have been the vintage itself:  different cider and yeast than I use now, and I recall there being some debate even back then about the quality of the finished product compared to prior years.  But it made me suspicious, and I drank only a few sips of it before throwing the rest out.  It’s kind of a bummer, because all along, I’ve had the idea that at some point I would get a few friends together and hold a vertical tasting.  If the maximum undegraded shelf-life of the product is only two or three years, then that idea’s pretty much shot in the ass.

On the other hand, there’s always some variation between bottles, even within the same year.  I’ll have to dig out my testing equipment the next time I decide to reach that far back.