How to choose wine for your child's 21st

I plan to buy a case or two of wine to put away for my baby daughter’s 21st. What would you recommend?

I recommend you do what flight attendants tell parents to do when the oxygen masks drop: attend to yourself first. Ignore what you fondly imagine your carefully reared child might fancy 20 years from now; the answer is all too likely to be fruit-flavoured vodka slushies. Choose a wine that will help you and her mother stay sane on that night in 2035 when your dainty newborn and her friends pump up the volume, the hired frozen margarita machine, and proceed to trash your newly renovated downstairs bathroom.

The challenge will be to find a wine made to cellar 20 years or more. Few whites can be counted on to last the distance, so you’ll probably be looking for a red.

Grange is an obvious answer but unless your name regularly appears on BRW’s annual Rich List, a couple of dozen may push the budget. Look for wines that resemble Grange: robust, oaky, highly structured blends that are too outrageously tannic to taste good when young but come into their own in middle and old age. You could do worse than look elsewhere in the Penfolds stable – they make several wines in this style. Shiraz and cabernet sauvignon – or blends – are likely to be good choices from producers with reputations for wines built to last.

You have ample time between nappy changes to think about this. The 2014 vintage has only recently been picked and is still sitting around in tanks and barrels in wineries. It will be months before it’s bottled and released, often longer in the case of wines made for the long run. Once these wines are released, spend a year – or even two – looking out for reviews from trusted wine writers, and make a note of the ones they say will last longest. In most years, for longevity I’d focus on regions such as South Australia’s Coonawarra. With the 2014 vintage having been pretty warm, it may turn out to be a good year to cellar some of the great cabernet sauvignons of Western Australia’s Margaret River.

When you do buy, keep the wine at a cool, constant temperature, somewhere dark. If you can’t do that, don’t bother buying wine: let them eat cake, and drink Vodka Cruisers.