Wine Terms - Backward

So "backward" is a term you hear a lot in everyday language. Put your car in reverse, it's going backward. Someone is confused, they have backward thinking. But what you probably don't realize, is that it can be used as an adjective describing a wine, and that it's got a very specific meaning. Check it out.

A "backward" wine is one that retains a lot of the characteristics of a young wine, even though it's been aged a pretty long time. Usually as a wine ages, the bold fruit flavors are one of the first things to drop away. If you taste a wine that's aged several years and it still has a strong fruit flavor, you could describe it as "backward." This normally means that that particular wine needs to be stored longer than average to reach it's "peak."