Few other avocations offer as many widely different kinds of pleasure. This one ranges from cultivating your own vineyard to making your own wine; you can tour the world's wine lands; build a wine cellar; collect old labels, fancy stemware; test your palate by tasting—you can even find sets of ceramic coasters or stone coasters that will match your drink glasses and harmonize with your choice of wine.



Wine also blends with gastronomy. All the noted amateur chefs are equally wine hobbyists, because high cuisine demands wine both as a seasoning and as an accompaniment at the table. As for literature, few kinds of reading offer more pleasure to the senses than recollections of memorable meals artfully blended with great vintages. Wine libraries contain the whole history of civilization.

The wine hobbyist experiences the subtler joys. He sees in his glowing wine the sky over vineyard hillsides; he inhales from it the essence of the countryside; he savors its bouquet, admires it as a work of art, and lets it infuse sunshine into his veins. He pays attention to the smaller details, such as using the correct bar accessories, beverage coasters, and drink glasses for the occasion.

Nothing in this article is intended to deprecate the higher arts of wine appreciation. The hope is that it will attract more genuine hobbyists to the subject, because unlike the overcrowding of favorite fishing holes, the more devotees of wine, the merrier. Let us first, therefore, expand the references made in earlier chapters to the aging of wines; for here is the principal delight in this entire sphere.

Although most of the world's wines reach their peak in quality early, and thereafter decline, certain red table wines, a very few whites, and a substantial proportion of the Sherries and dessert wines develop superlative quality with long years in their bottles.

The extent of their improvement in glass—after their preliminary maturing in casks—can be likened to the difference between sandstone drink coasters merely planed and the same stone sandpapered, or to the difference between a rosebud and the full-blown flower.

But the selection of such wines requires study. Many of the leading Bordeaux producers, once noted for the longevity of their wines—vintages famed for living a half-century or longer—have changed their output in recent years to lighter, earlier-maturing wines.

Even the Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons, of which there are magnificent examples nearly fifty years old, are being made lighter and earlier maturing now than formerly, by drawing the wine off the grape skins before fermentation is complete.

One reason for this is the modern consumer's apparent liking for fresher-tasting, lighter-bodied wines than formerly. Another is that vintners have come to realize that merchants cannot afford to keep stocks many years before sale.

The California premium producers usually store their wines in bins at the wineries for a few months to a year after bottling—just to take off the rough edges, they say. But binning is expensive in terms of space, handling, and waiting for the proceeds of sale. Only the householder can reasonably be expected to buy wines for the special purpose of aging in the bottle.