In an interview for 60 Minutes in 2004, the journalist Ed Bradley asked Bob Dylan if there was anything in his early work that surprised him. Hi Bobness looked pensive for a moment before quoting the beautiful opening lines of It’s Alright, Ma (I’m only bleeding). “I don’t know how I got to write those songs,” he said, “…they were almost magically written.” Did the muses still hum such poetry – the very stuff that earned Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature – in his ear? Dylan shook his head. “You can’t do something for ever,” he replied. “I can do other things now, but I can’t do that.”
What other things can Dylan do? Well, earn money touring for a start. If you’re tempted, over the next month or so you can hear him at the Uber Eats Music Hall in Berlin, the Motorpoint Arena in Nottingham or the University of Wolverhampton. Will he be playing any new material? Of course not. As the golfer Lee Trevino once said, “the older I get, the better I used to be”. Even if Dylan could write as he once did, fans want to hear the classic songs. As David Hepworth puts it in his new book Hope I Get Old Before I Die, famous musicians become “human jukeboxes”. There’s a whole industry built on ageing rock stars performing their greatest hits. Sir Mick Jagger is 81; Sir Paul McCartney 82; Dylan 83.
During my recent trip to Ribera del Duero, I caught up with Mariano García, one of Spain’s finest winemakers. Now 80, he is still at the top of his considerable powers. He looks trim; his mind is alert, his palate discriminating. García was a legendary figure at Vega Sicilia, where he made the wines between 1968 and 1998, before leaving to set up Bodegas Aalto. Today, working alongside his sons Eduardo and Alberto, he oversees family projects in Toro (San Román), Bierzo (Valeyo), Rioja (Baynos), Ribera del Duero (Garmón) and Castilla y León (Mauro). For a man whose passions in life are “travelling and gastronomy”, García is in great shape. “My dad takes care of himself,” Eduardo told me. “He doesn’t eat or drink too much and he does pilates several times a week.”
The point about García – and other elderly winemakers I admire – is that, unlike rock stars of a similar age, they aren’t just performing their greatest hits. Each vintage is different; new challenges are accepted and even welcomed. Before he retired – at 80 – from his job as CEO and winemaker at Ridge Vineyards in California, Paul Draper produced sublime reds whose style was constantly evolving. He claimed to favour “pre-industrial techniques”, but Draper was no Luddite. Indeed, he is one of the most thoughtful people I’ve ever met.
Do winemakers improve with age? Some do, some don’t. I can think of at least one global consultant who’s been prating the same shibboleths since the 1980s and still commands big fees for increasingly outmoded advice. Past a certain point, our noses and palates lose focus as the decades accumulate – an early sign of Alzheimers is loss of smell – but experience and judgment can help to compensate for that relative decline.
Successful older winemakers also have the self-assurance that comes with financial security. When Marcos Yllera went to see Jean-Claude Berrouet, the so-called poet of Pomerol who made Château Pétrus between 1964 and 2008, to ask him to get involved with his new project Vivaltus in Ribera del Duero in 2016, the great man served his Spanish guest two wines. One was inky, extracted and smudged with new oak; the other was lighter-bodied, elegant, detailed and refined. “If you want to make this,” he said, pointing at the first glass, “I’m not interested. If you prefer the second wine, I’ll consult for you.”
How long will the likes of Berrouet, now, at 81, “older than President Biden”, as he likes to say, and Mariano García go on for? They’re obviously not eternal, but I’d like to think that they’ll be with us for a while yet. The decision will be theirs, at least. In 1996, the great Burgundian winemaker Henri Jayer was told to stop making wine or forfeit his French pension. Undeterred, he transferred his vineyards to his nephew, Emmanuel Rouget, and helped him in secret for another five years. The best winemakers love what they do, you see. The rewards are much bigger, but that’s probably true of crumbly rock stars too.
Originally published in Harpers Wine & Spirit; photo by Nikoloz Gachechiladze on Unsplash