‘Trouble is,’ said my old friend, ‘that’s just not what I want to drink any more.’

He was referring to the cellar he’d built up over 30 years and more: mostly claret at the good-but-affordable level.  Not trophy wines; stuff like Lynch Bages, Léoville-Barton – the sort of wines beloved of British drinkers buying for themselves and their friends to drink, as they thought, for the rest of their lives.

And then they turned out to be a bit more fickle than they expected. Their heads got turned by all sorts of things. Rather like somebody inching their way out of a relationship, first there was a case of Volnay – ‘but only a one-off’. And then Italy got so good, and Tuscany seemed just like claret but a bit racier; and then there was Australia, and then there was Austria, and Port, and Spain, and then…

Now, like a man in the full throes of a middle-aged crisis, he’s trying everything. And the claret is languishing like a discarded lover, waiting to be shipped out and auctioned off. L’uomo è mobile.

Why should our attention spans for wine be longer than for anything else? They’re shorter than the lifespan of a vineyard, especially now old vines are the fashion. (A grower the other day told me his vines were ‘very old’. How old? ‘Thirty years.’ I thought, this jumper is older than that.) They’re shorter than the lifetime of a fine wine. Building up a cellar is a long-term thing; maybe the sort of thing you do when you believe that what you think and like now is what you will always think and like. (Maybe that’s also the reason people sometimes get married so frighteningly young.) But one changes; one reads different books, likes different music. I never built up much of a cellar, and now I’m glad I’m not saddled with the wines I liked 30 years ago: I like novelty, variety. I like changing fashions in wine, too.

How do you know when a fashion is about to change? Perhaps when its exemplars lose sight of the original. Is that happening with Pinot Noir? When Pinot becomes unremarkable it has lost its point. I seem to taste quite a few unremarkable Pinots – wines that rely on their association with great Burgundy, but wines to which great Burgundy would not give the time of day. One – English, alas – was correct but insipid. £28’s worth of pointlessness.

Which brings me to a tangent: is orange wine the red of England? Yes, the Crouch Valley and all that – good reds, proper Pinot. But how big is it? Even if it had agreed boundaries, which it doesn’t, it is quite tiny. And even with the boundaries stretched à la Coonawarra, to include everything that might be sort of similar, it’s still small. I support every inch of it and love its wine, but most of the English reds I taste from other parts of the country do not lead me to think that English red is going to take over the world just yet.

Orange wine from England, though…

Yes, it tastes like orange wine, and if you don’t like that you won’t like this. I’m not sure that there’s anything particular that marks it out as English, but I would take that over a £28 joyless red. I like orange wine; I like its freshness, the way it calms the more strident grapes of England – even Bacchus and assorted PiWis can become drinkable, even rather good, and normally I loathe Bacchus. English orange goes with food brilliantly, and it looks pretty in the glass, which of course is a frivolous concern and matters not at all, but you can put it in an English 18th-century decanter (available for a song, believe me) without it looking like a hospital sample.

I understand why English growers want to make red wine. If they don’t practise they won’t get it right, and if they want to get it right in 10 years’ time they have to start now. Wine is like that. And if they make it they have to sell it, because economics are like that. Does it do much for the reputation of English wine to have so many indifferent wines competing with the good ones? Emerging regions are like that. I remember the way that Oregon wines were over-hyped decades ago and had to get over that to, eventually, establish a real reputation. Nothing comes easily if you’re a wine grower.

But there again, attention spans…

Attention spans are always against growers. Growers have to ignore fashion in what they grow, because by the time the vines are mature fashion might be looking elsewhere. Growing what suits your site and doing it very very well might be the best defence against fashion, although it didn’t help the growers of indigenous grapes back in the 1980s and 1990s when everybody wanted Chardonnay and only Chardonnay, and smart-arse wine writers told them that’s what they had to grow. (Gentle reader, I was there.)

What they can change quickly is their winemaking. Back in the day they made Pinot to taste as much like Cabernet as they could; now it’s the other way round.

Or they can make orange wines, or use amphorae and all the rest of that stuff; or they can make white wine from Pinot Noir, as Greywacke is doing in association with Piper-Heidsieck, and as PH is doing with a couple of Coteaux Champenois on its own.

Novelty. It’s what we as consumers demand and respond to, while purporting to admire the long-term – centenarian vines, the planting of trees in vineyards, wines that can keep for 20 or 50 years. Will red Pinot Noir soon be yesterday’s wine? When do experiments settle into routine?

I can only offer one suggestion: if you like aged wine, get somebody else to age it. Because the wine you’ll want to drink in 20 years’ time is not the wine you’re buying now. Embrace fickleness. Travel light.

Photo by Sun Lingyan on Unsplash