Patience is a virtue. This cliche probably applies to winemaking better than it does to any other activity. That doesn't mean that it'll be 5 years before you find out if a small oversight you made today ruined your whole batch. In fact, many concentrate kits recommend a 28 day process from start to finish. Once it's in the bottle, the wine can be aged for a month or two and then consumed. This is acceptable, but better wine really can be made just by adding some time to the fermentation and bottle-aging processes. 3 months in the fermentor will usually make a better wine than one month. And 6 months in the bottle will generally be better than 1.

Once you have been making wine at home for a while, you will probably always have properly aged wine to bottle, properly aged wine to drink, and new wine to be made. When you're just starting out, though, it's tough to have patience. Luckily, you will have enough bottles of wine that you can drink some too early, some at the right time, and some after the wine's peak. It's one of the ways home winemakers come to understand the wine aging process better than "mere" wine lovers.

wally, you are right about ageing to improve your wine, i usually leave my wine in the fermenter for a minimum of two months, some types of wine takes up to six months fermenting. when i do bottle i usually save the first and the last runnings to drink right away and then put the rest on the shelf for ageing. i have some black beauty grape wine on the shelf thats five years old, persimmon wine two years old, peppermint wine one year old, and pomgranite wine six years old. i just bottled 20 gal. dago red wine last week,and the samples are great. i have used the concentrates while waiting for the local stuff to come in season, favorites are elderberry, raspberry, strawberry, and blackberry. usually have a carboy or two of something going most of the time.
i have never used oak chips or barrels in my wine, what kind of flavor will that add? have used oak chips in some hard stuff and get a vanilla flavor there. guess i'll have to try some and find out.
gary