(PasteMagazine) - If you live in Brooklyn, vintage is usually a pair of ripped Levi’s from the seventies. But when it comes to wine, a vintage is “one made from grapes that were all, or primarily, grown and harvested in a single specified year.”

This may sound simple, but even experienced wine drinkers can feel overwhelmed when it comes to vintage. Many think it is an exercise in memorization, but it doesn’t have to be.

I recently had the opportunity to attend The Vintage Effect, part of French Institute Alliance Française Wine Tour de France led by Hortense Bernard, General Manager of Millesima USA.

Ms. Bernard believes that understanding vintage is “A lot of work … or, that is, a pleasure!” Basically, it depends on how you approach it.

I get to taste wines regularly as a sommelier, which helps me to retain some information about various vintages in different regions. Discovering a few older vintages of wines you love may be a lofty enough goal for the casual wine drinker. If you are a Bordeaux lover, this type of tasting is a good place to start.

Held in the spacious sky room at FIAF’s Upper East Side headquarters, The Vintage Effect was a polished and thoughtful tasting. Place settings generously included bread from Pain d’Avignon, cheeses from Président and charcuterie from D’Artagnan.

Tasting sheets and a pencil as well as notes on the wine program at Fiaf were provided. Participants introduced themselves to their neighbors and chatted, but overall it was quiet with occasional questions from the mainly American audience.

The format of the tasting followed an idea noted in Eric Asimov’s recent review of Oregon Pinot Noir for The New York Times.

“Instead of zeroing in on a vintage that is supposed to be great, it’s far more interesting to identify producers with whom you are stylistically aligned, and then to see how these producers respond to the challenges of each vintage.”

Context is important and that’s why a tasting focused on vintage can be so helpful. To see the difference, taste the same or similar wines from different vintages side by side.

This particular tasting allowed the audience to juxtapose toddler and teenage wines from Saint Julien on the left bank of Bordeaux (cabernet-based) and Pomerol on the right bank (merlot-based).

An end of tasting vote indicated that the older wines were generally preferred, but the audience was split about their preference for the more intense left bank or the softer right.

Another helpful tip before drinking an oldie — the conversation about vintage includes the effects of aging. When we talk about vintage, we’re referring to the effect of weather conditions during the year the grapes were grown.

When we talk about age, we’re talking about the effect of wine sitting in the bottle. There are chemical changes going on inside that bottle while the cork lets in a tiny amount of air. Tasting older wines against newer wines allows us to have a conversation about the year the wine was made, as well as how it has changed during storage.