Is the true pleasure of wine all in the experience? Kris Pathirana explores the thrills of finding and tasting old vintages, and why the extremes of joy and disappointment are more exhilirating than the wine that’s just “fine”.
Recently, I have been feeling about wine the same way I feel about newly launched streaming shows. Spoiled, yet underwhelmed. As a child of the nineties, I am still conditioned to believe that anything beyond five channels is a Marie Antoinette-level of luxury, yet despite the bountiful entertainment I now have access to, I watch less television than ever. This is not an indictment of quality. It is harder than ever to get television made, and standards are generally superior to the average show of thirty years ago. It is not that I am paralysed by choice, it is just that most shows are, well… fine. Solid. But not an ‘experience’.
Wine has become a tentpole in my life, and I have never, and will never, have it so good. I taste around fifty wines a month, unless I attend a portfolio tasting and start hitting Kingsley Amiss numbers. But tasting is not drinking, and I only actually consume about two glasses a week. This is down to a post-pandemic distaste for morning dustiness, and an eye-wateringly expensive gym membership. Not that these wines are not worth drinking. They almost always are. The problem is that they are fine. The more quality wine I drink, the more that simple pleasure becomes the norm. I expect it to be pleasant, but I crave it to be an experience.
To paraphrase Sheryl Crow, the appeal of a “Beer Bourgogne Aligoté buzz early in the morning,” has long gone. When everything tastes good, you stop wanting to be satisfied, and start wanting to be thrilled. Or disappointed. In fact, lately I find the possibility of disappointment is what makes a bottle worth uncorking. I want risk. I want unpredictability. I want something beyond mere consumption. You might think that this would lead me to pursue the variation of overtly natural wine. But I am looking for the possibility of transcendence, not choosing my shade of ‘meh’, from the recommendations of a moustachioed Somm with working-class tattoos and private school entitlement.
Instead, I have been going out of my way to discover old vintages of random, yet affordable wines from the 1980s & 90s that I have never heard of. This is as close to antique hunting as I will ever get. As a younger man, older wines felt the preserve of either the truly informed or the truly snooty. But age does not equate quality, nor does it equate expense. Many of the older vintages I have cracked recently were less than £40 retail. I say retail, because it is rare to find aged wines on restaurant lists that are not from marquee producers. This is not only a shame, but a missed opportunity. What is the value of listing four Cabernet Sauvignons from the same region, but with a vintage span of the preceding five years, when there is arguably as much difference in flavour between wines made from the same grape, but different terroirs, as there are between wines of the same grape, but different decades. Charting how a wine has developed, and unearthing what tertiary characteristics have evolved, just makes uncorking a bottle so much more exciting.
Some of the wines Kris has been enjoying, from 1986 Vega Sicilia to 1988 Nuits-st-Georges 1er Cru.
The joy is in the thrill of discovery, and discovery carries risk. Not all bottles last the test of time – there are middle-class stakes attached. Are we about to have a unique experience, or did I just blow my wad on fruitless, oxidised juice? Each bottle is a roll of the dice. Some days you’re drinking the first season of True Detective, the next you’re drinking the second season of True Detective. Therein lies the rub and the appeal of unknowable alchemy. At times, I wonder whether I have eliminated so many vices from my life, that I need to create these supposed high risk, high reward scenarios to compensate for the soft environments I now regularly find myself in. But what is for certain, is that older wines still hold romance for me, in a way that younger wines seldom do. I love how a wine can spend decades travelling around the world and pass through hundreds of pairs of hands, without ever being opened, because from inception, that bottle had your name on it.
Given how wine touches virtually every facet of our society; agriculture, science, art, commerce, politics, there is an argument that wine is a time capsule. A message in a bottle from winemakers, perhaps long dead, to wine drinkers, perhaps not even born when the grapes were picked. The wine alone chronicles the passage of time. Conversely, the wine knows nothing beyond the year of its harvest, so there is something comfortingly utopic about opening a ‘99, knowing that it would only be aware of The Matrix, but mercifully oblivious to its sequels.
In our minimalist, online world, everything feels eternal. That clip, that tweet, that song. Everything sits on a server somewhere awaiting its instant download. The finite is only compelling because we know it will end. The act of hunting down random, old wines hits deeper because we intrinsically know that when this bottle ends, there will not be another on the shelf. There may not even be another, period. We glimpse however fleetingly, however subconsciously, our own mortality. This taste, this experience, is it. And it… ends.
There is value in scarcity. When someone tells me of a new show that I have to watch, I know that not only do I have to do no such thing, but they will have forgotten this show, and be ardently advocating for another in eight days’ time. This is why most modern streaming shows seem to appear with a large splash, then disappear with barely a ripple thereafter. From ‘must see’ to ‘oh yeah, that’ in a matter of weeks. A fleeting adoration, arguably because the audience paid such little price for it, thus establishing its value to them. They can watch it anywhere, anytime, forever. It is not the paralysis of choice that has curbed my television consumption, but the mundanity of access.
The act of hunting through boutique wine stores for an obscure, old bottle adds texture, context, and anticipation to its uncorking. The knowledge that something is a singular, tactile experience not backed up in the cloud is oddly comforting. As is, that you must be physically present at a specific time and place to share it. So much it seems comes back to sharing. We once lamented that all families did was watch television together. Now we don’t even do that. These forgotten, misfit, viniferous gems are not bottles to open alone, because these bottles do not merely have your name on them. They have the names of the people you will share them with, and while you may not know who they’ll be… the bottle does. It always did, and it knew that its only purpose was to bring you together for one unrepeatable moment.
All it asked was that you put in a little effort to find it.
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What are some of the special bottles you’ve been drinking recently? Share your latest finds with us in the comments below. Like this article? Share it wide!