When Should You Open Your Older Bottles of Monte Bello?
Blog Post
How to Use Our Vintage Tracker as Your Guide
August 2025
We recently received some thoughtful questions from a Monte Bello Collector member about the best time to enjoy different vintages of Monte Bello. While they had consulted our Monte Bello Vintage Tracker online, they wanted more clarity on how to interpret the information we provide. Below is a summary of how to use the Vintage Tracker as a guide, along with some advice on opening older bottles of Monte Bello.
The Bell Curve Concept
When thinking about a wine’s drinking window, picture a bell curve. The life of an age-worthy wine generally follows this shape: after bottling, the wine begins an upward trajectory, gaining complexity and integrating its tannins. Over time, it continues to improve until it reaches a plateau, which is the point where it is at its peak. What makes Monte Bello so unique is the long period, typically a decade or more, over which it remains at optimal drinking age. This means, for example, that the 1984 Monte Bello, which entered its ideal drinking window around 2006, today, after 19 years, remains on a plateau of unparallelled complexity.
We created our Vintage Trackers to help our customers decide when they might want to open some of our more age-worthy wines. The tracker uses four primary categories that align with the bell curve concept:
- Hold = Youthful. While it will bring some enjoyment now it will clearly improve with time.
- Drink or Hold = Enjoyable now but will improve with time.
- Drink = Very Enjoyable Now. Likely to hold and could improve with time.
- Drink Now = Mature. In most cases still enjoyable, but likely to fade over time.
Optimal Drinking Windows
In addition, many vintages also include an optimal drinking window, which represents our best estimate of when the wine will be within its peak drinking phase. Importantly, the dates listed are counted from today, not from the vintage year. For example, if the 2011 Monte Bello has a current optimal drinking window of 20–30 years, our suggestion is that it will be at its best between 2045 and 2055. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t open that wine prior to 2045, only that we feel that vintage will begin to reach its peak during that window.
Monte Bello has an exceptionally long life, with its development, peak, and gradual decline often stretching over 50 years. That said, you don’t have to wait decades. Most vintages are delicious upon release and only grow more complex over the first 10–15 years. For those with the patience, and proper cellaring conditions, additional decades will yield extraordinary rewards, but there is no need to wait if the moment feels right.
If you choose to open your wine before it reaches the “Drink” stage, we strongly recommend decanting it at least 30 minutes before serving. Wines that are “Drink Now” should be consumed soon after opening, but might develop further while in the glass.
In the end, wine is meant to bring joy and to be shared with good company. And for that reason, there’s no such thing as a wrong time to open a great bottle.
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