Lockdown means it’s time to drink your most prized bottles of wine

Losing your sense of smell due to Covid is no joke when you make a living in food and wine. In April last year my taste buds shut down for three weeks. I began staring at my wine cellar like a recovering addict for whom the drugs no longer worked. Sure, I’d read posts from other sufferers who were concerned about whether or not their olfactory organs would ever get back to normal, but I’m fatalistic, and besides, my chances were good. But if my smell didn’t return, I’d rue having not lived in the moment more often.

Pandemics, floods, wildfires, cyber-attacks, artificial intelligence, terrorism: we’re living in a boom time for disaster, so if you’re not opening your most prized bottles of wine now, when exactly do you plan on doing so? Eckhart Tolle missed a trick by not encouraging neurotic winos to do so in his self-help classic The Power of Now: surely a vital part of vinous appreciation is being able to live intensely in the present. How many times have you pondered bottles past and future while deciding what to open, then talked yourself out of anything very good? Too subtle, too simple, too young, too old, too complex, too alcoholic, too… wet.

Why anyone still buys Bordeaux en primeur when killer robots are on the horizon is beyond me. Fine wine is one of the few luxuries that can cost a fortune but requires a secondary investment of something much more valuable: time. When a Pauillac with 25 years in the cellar, around the time they begin to get interesting, can be bought for a similar price to a new release, why bet you’ll be in a position to enjoy it in the future instead of living in an apocalyptic wasteland that makes The Terminator look like Mary Poppins? Did you see the lockdowns coming more than a few days before they started? Well, hurry up and pass the corkscrew.