Walls: Memento Mori
In his first column of the year Matt Walls discusses how our investment in and enjoyment of wine plays to our most human of traits: patience, hope and death.
Happy New Year!
Let’s talk about death.
Don’t worry, this column isn’t going to be relentlessly depressing. I wouldn’t do that to you in January. Quite the opposite, I hope.
But you can’t deny that when you’re into wine, the shadow of the reaper just keeps popping up.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that wine collecting tends to be something that typically only interests people in their 30s and older. You need to be ready and willing to play the long game. The longest game.
Thirst-inducing
It’s a peculiar hobby really. Let’s consider the 1990 vintage – a lovely year, from Hermitage to Pauillac to Piedmont. If a year like that came around again next year, I would snap up as much as I could en primeur.
Then all I’d need to do is wait 35 years for it to reach its sweet spot. I’d be in my 80s by then. I’d certainly hope to still be fighting fit but… it’s far from a given.
Get our daily fine wine reviews, latest wine ratings, news and travel guides delivered straight to your inbox.
I was lucky enough to start collecting in my mid-20s, and now – finally – some of the Hermitage I bought is now ready to drink.
A crucial moment for any collector – the long, parched wait is over, and the drinking can begin. Finally – it feels almost miraculous after so many years – some bottles are good to go. And you marvel at your younger self for making at least some good decisions.
Sure, you could just buy mature vintages. Skip the cellaring. But it’s not quite the same as buying young wines and ageing them yourself.
When you’ve invested so much patience in these specific bottles, they no longer just contain wine; they contain hope.
And when that hope is repaid, they taste all the better.
See Matt Walls’ top 10 wines of 2024 here
Vinous lifespans
Death stalks the vineyard too. Vines are living things after all, each with their own allotted time on this earth. It’s often noted that their lifespan reflects that of a man or woman.
Vines are vigorous in youth, generating abundant fruit – if not always the best quality. They mature at 20 to 30 years of age, and they tend to give their best between this point and 60 to 70 years. As they get older, they offer less, but what they produce is deep and valuable.
And, like people, they might live even longer if not affected by disease, stress or pests. But they’ll end up looking pretty gnarly.
All this talk of death can make working with centuries-old estates somehow reassuring.
Their long endurance puts our ‘three score years and ten’ in context. It brings comforting thoughts of lineage, of generational transfer.
But let me just swoop in here, cackling, to remind us that all this is an illusion. Winery buildings stand strong and labels stay the same, but wine is a product of a winemaker, or winemaking team.
When a parent passes an estate on to their child, the wine is never the same. It will change – subtly, or perhaps dramatically – with every generation, with every winemaker.
We know this of course. That’s why the bottles that we covet most of all are by great winemakers that have departed – in the Rhône, for example, which producers fetch higher prices than Gentaz-Dervieux, Noël Verset and Henri Bonneau? God rest their souls.
Future investment
I wonder why. Perhaps we know the stocks will never be replenished, unlike the output of the living, so we must grab the remaining bottle while we can.
Or do we just pile in because we hope the price will rise on the secondary market, like ghouls feasting on the dead?
Some of us feel that drinking these antique wines somehow plugs us into the past, extending our own lives backwards, if only for an evening – showing us a vision of how things used to be. In the good old days of hoes, horses and hard winters.
Every bottle is a memento mori. But despite all this – and the fact that the average cellar looks like Nosferatu’s bedroom, all cobwebs and dusty wooden boxes – wine collecting is far from a morbid affair.
In fact, it’s an investment in your own – and your loved ones’ – future happiness.
Every purchase comes with an unspoken statement: ‘whether it be five, 10 or 20 years, I intend to be alive when this bottle is ready to drink – and I gift this to my future self.’
So open, drink and celebrate those good decisions you made in the past. And bank many Happy New Years to come with another case or two.
Related articles
- Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2020: Best-value wines
- Walls: The importance of drinking windows over scores
- White Châteauneuf-du-Pape: 20 of the best
Matt Walls is an award-winning freelance wine writer and consultant, contributing regular articles to various print and online titles including Decanter, where he is a contributing editor. He has particular interest in the Rhône Valley; he is chair of the Rhône panel at the Decanter World Wine Awards and is the owner of travel and events company www.rhoneroots.com.