One of the perennial debates among wine lovers is whether wine is best drunk straight on release, after five or 10 years, or decades down the road. Even collectors and winemakers can't agree, leading to understandable confusion among the rest of us. And cultural differences also come into play, spawning the old wine-trade adage that, when it comes to aging, "The French may be pedophiles, but the English are definitely necrophiliacs!"

So what exactly happens as a wine ages? All wines contain hundreds of different organic compounds, which -- to use a very broad brush -- can be thought of as belonging to one of three groups. The acids are what give wine its bite. Tannins are the astringent compounds that give wine its structure. And the third, and least understood group, are the anthrocyans and phenolyics, which provide the color and flavor. For simplicity, just think of these three groups as the acids, tannins and flavors.

In a young bottle of wine, these various compounds are relatively small and separate elements, but over time they agglomerate to form long, complex chains. Eventually, these "mothers of all flavor molecules" become so large that they precipitate out of solution, becoming the sediments that drinkers of older bottles of red wine are probably familiar with.