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How a drinking window is calculated

Five levels, two adjustments, and what we still get wrong.

Fifteen of the sixteen cellar apps we have compared say they tell you when to drink your wine. Almost none of them say how. That matters, because the methods behind that promise are not comparable, and the difference shows up on the bottles you care most about. Here is how ours works, and where it is still weak.

Why the method matters more than the promise

Three approaches exist in this market, and they fail in different places. Following the producer's own recommendation gives the most reliable answer, provided the producer gives one, which a small grower rarely does. Interpolating grape ageing curves covers everything, at the cost of treating a first growth and a supermarket red from the same grape as the same wine. Leaning on a wine database is precise for the wines that are in it and silent for the bottle you brought back from a holiday.

Ours is a table: it starts from the most precise information and works down to the most general, so it always has an answer. Its weakness is the opposite of a database's: it is only as good as the rules we wrote. Which is why most of this page is about how we find the wrong ones.

The five levels

The levels are checked in order, and the first one with an answer applies.

Why the estate comes before the appellation

An appellation rule describes the average producer. “A Pauillac keeps for thirty years” is true for a thousand châteaux and wrong for five of them, in both directions: the celebrated ones outlive it by decades, and a second wine from the same estate never reaches it. Named estates are therefore checked first, and when we have no rule for one, the rule for its appellation applies, and it still holds.

Why Champagne is the exception

In our table, it is the appellation that sets the rank of the wine. That works in Burgundy, where the hierarchy is in the name (village, 1er cru, grand cru). It does not work in Champagne, where the whole region is a single appellation: a prestige cuvée from a declared year and a brut with no year fall under the same rule, when the market gives one fifteen years and the other three. For Champagne, the type of cuvée decides instead, and those rules are published on the Champagne page.

Label mentions

Some mentions legally impose a longer ageing before release, and the wine that carries them keeps longer: a 1er Cru outlives its village, a Gran Reserva outlives a Crianza. Caviste reads them from the appellation you typed. Others, like Grand Cru or Classico, designate a zone or a rank our rules already account for, so they change nothing on their own: counting the same thing twice would be worse than ignoring it.

Two adjustments specific to your bottle

The vintage

828 rated years across 30 regions, on a deliberately coarse five-notch scale from exceptional to weak. We do not pretend to separate a 92-point year from a 94-point one, and a year we have not rated is neutral rather than guessed at. Colour matters as much as region: the sweet wines of Bordeaux do not share the great years of its reds, 2007 being mediocre in red and immense in Sauternes. A great year lengthens the window and a weak one shortens it, including for the longest-lived wines. That is what separates a legendary 1961 from a washed-out 1974 at the very same address. Year by year, the windows are published in the vintage charts.

The format

Wine ages more slowly in a large bottle and faster in a small one, so a magnum stretches the window and a half bottle shortens it.

Where the years are counted from

From the vintage, normally. A sparkling wine with no vintage used to get no window at all, and therefore no gauge, no reminder and no place in the list of what to drink. It is now counted from the year you bought it, the only date that means anything for a non-vintage bottle. Elsewhere, a missing vintage is an incomplete entry rather than a property of the wine, so we leave it alone.

What we get wrong

Worth stating plainly, because a method you cannot criticise is a marketing claim.

• Longevity that comes from the producer, beyond the estates we have written a rule for. This is the real hole, and no appellation rule can fill it: the legendary bottles of the twentieth century are legendary because of who made them in that year, and a table of appellations will always describe them as ordinary.
• Unusual label wording. The further a label strays from the plain appellation name, the more likely we answer at the regional level instead.
• An unrated year is neutral, so we stay silent on most of the world outside the regions we have scored.
• These are indicative benchmarks, not a verdict. Every window is editable on every bottle.

How we know when we are wrong

This is the part no comparison table has a column for. Every app can claim drinking windows; the question is whether anyone ever finds out that theirs are off.

We measure it, and we ask you nothing to do it. When you rewrite a window we suggested, Caviste compares your years with what the rule says today and keeps the gap. Those gaps are averaged per appellation, because that is the level at which we know what to fix: one person disagreeing tells us nothing, while several people pushing the end of the same appellation back by years tells us a rule needs revisiting.

Not adding a rating button was deliberate. Caviste already offers a thumbs up elsewhere and it is barely used. People vote for others and correct for themselves: the first is rare, the second common.

We publish no accuracy figure here yet. The measurement started in August 2026, and it takes several weeks of use before an average means anything. We would rather leave this paragraph empty than fill it with a number we cannot stand behind, and the figures will go here when they exist.

A passed window is not an alert

A wine past its window is not a wine to throw away, and an app that turns it red and sounds an alarm is an app you learn to ignore. Caviste shows “Past its window”, tells you on the bottle sheet how many years ago that was, and leaves a long-ageing wine out of the urgent reminders. The judgment stays yours: you are the one who knows how the bottle was stored.

Frequently asked questions

How long should I age a wine?

It depends on four things, in this order of weight: who made it, where it comes from, the vintage, and the bottle format. Caviste looks at them in that order, from the estate down to the grape variety, so it always has an answer. A Champagne with no vintage keeps a few years, while a prestige cuvée from a declared year keeps decades. These are indicative oenological benchmarks, and every window stays editable on every bottle.

Why do two wines from the same appellation get different windows?

Because the appellation is not the only thing that decides. An appellation rule describes the average producer, so Caviste checks named estates first and reads the label mentions that legally impose a longer ageing. The vintage and the bottle format then move the result: a magnum stretches the window, a half bottle shortens it, and a weak year shortens everything.

How do you know your drinking windows are right?

We measure them. When you rewrite a window we suggested, Caviste compares your years with what the rule says today and keeps the gap, then averages those gaps per appellation. Several people pushing the end of the same appellation back by years tells us a rule needs revisiting. We ask for no vote and no rating: the measurement runs on corrections people make for themselves. It is still early days, so we publish no accuracy figure yet rather than invent one.

See also: Ageing potential by appellation · Vintage charts · All the cellar apps compared · FAQ

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