Tim James: How your taste in wine changes as you age

Wine is not so much about wine as about the drinkers of wine; more: the individual drinker of wine. It’s your tastebuds, your DNA, your history. And your budget, not so incidentally. Get objective as much as you like (or can), but there’s always something personal influencing the vote – twisting the score if you’re that way inclined or if it’s your job. The implicit vote might be a vote in a group, or it might be the silent vote to pour another glass, or the promise to oneself to buy another bottle. I would have little respect for the wine-lover who, as a rule, bases a bottle-buying or cork-drawing strategy solely on someone else’s rating (unless of course there is a well-established compatability of taste). Expert opinion? Hmm….

Ah, we’re in for some self-indulgent stuff, the canny reader with a finger ever-poised on the “back” key will have already realised, and has probably disappeared already. The less canny should learn that the canny reader is correct – so abort now, with my blessing, or also indulge the experience of someone else.

Sideways shift, then: A significant difference between being old and being young is that one ponders being old, while being young was simply the air one breathed. The past, it’s been famously said, is a foreign country – “they do things differently there”, but it could be argued that it’s the past that’s familiar, and the current world of stiffness or pain and lost names and words and flexibility is what seems foreign. I’m not going to launch into an exploration of all that, beyond noting that there are indeed a few gains as well as many losses, and that generalisations here are as limited in significance as they always are in accounting for human experience. The nature of my elderliness is not necessarily shared.

But, to repeat, getting older is something that happens with consciousness in attendance. And because one is alert to the occasional advantages and numerous disadvantages, one also notices what other people say about it all. As when I read just recently the opening paragraph of a story (“The DiDomenico Fragment”, by the greatly entertaining and skilful American writer Amor Towles). Attributable to the hero of the story rather than necessarily the author (who was born in 1964), it goes thus:

“The only advantage to growing old is that one loses one’s appetites. After the age of sixty-five one wishes to travel less, eat less, own less. At that point, there is no better way to end one’s day than with a few sips of an old Scotch [brandy for me!], and a king-size bed without distractions [other than a sleepy dog or two].”

Apart from my bracketed interjections, I largely agree with that except for the idea of eating less: I have resolutely become more greedy and am vaguely struggling with emergent obesity ­– but I have noticed that older people seldom remain the shape they had earlier, but usually get too fat or too thin.

As this is supposed to be a column about wine, I’ll avoid the multiple distractions of possibilities raised by the idea of pros and cons of ageing, but it’s perhaps worth confronting what has changed in my wine-drinking in the decades since I was unquestioningly middle-aged (generously taking full-aged to be more or less 75–80 for middle-class whities; overall average life expectancy in South Africa in 2022 was 60 for men, 65.6 for women, according to StatsSA).

I mentioned brandy, and in fact my intake of that has certainly increased, though I think a decrease in wine consumption, and an attempt to maintain an alcohol-free Monday, means my average alcohol consumption, including the occasional party, has probably declined from its height (though is certainly still too high, at the approximate equivalent of up to a bottle of wine on most days). That fits in a little with the Towles idea of a diminished appetite.

One change, one reduced mental appetite, is the virtual disappearance of the “fear of missing out”. Having had the great privilege of chronicling the crucial decades of the Cape wine revolution, for example, I am less excited to keep up to date these days. The new seems not all that new, more an expansion and consolidation of what was once immensely new (rebirth of the Swartland, Hemel-en-Aarde, Elgin…, chenin’s renaissance and new white blends… lighter and fresher reds, single-vineyard and old-vineyard wines, exciting new producers, etc, etc) – though expansion and consolidation are exciting and vital in themselves. And if I don’t get to experience the new best thing in the wider wine world, that’s OK with me. That’s also an aspect of “wishing to travel less”, I think. Lost FOMO also applies to rare or grand bottles; though I’m far from averse to drinking great wines, increasingly value what gives me simple pleasure.

Have my drinking tastes changed? Apart from the increased appeal of brandy, that is. Perhaps. In international terms, I have returned to an earlier devotion to red bordeaux, which I rather abandoned in deference to red burgundy: now I regret having spent so much money on the latter rather than the former; cabernet-based wines seem in general so much more interesting than pinot. But, talking of burgundy, my pleasure in chardonnay has greatly increased – mostly the local version, and that perhaps because there are now so many more excellent ones around. In fact, I enjoy white wines much more than I used to, and drink them regularly and often, whereas it used to be almost exclusively reds that I’d choose: that now seems to me strange!

Well, there’s perhaps time for further change, for further reductions in loss of appetite. We’ll see. The more I see about the horrors of international tourism, the more content I am to stay at home with my dogs. Must try to control the brandy, perhaps. And eating less would be useful.

• Tim James is one of South Africa’s leading wine commentators, contributing to various local and international wine publications. His book Wines of South Africa – Tradition and Revolution appeared in 2013.