There’s no reason to drink a wine more than once

I am going to start this week with what, for someone who prides himself on being adventurous in the kitchen, counts as a confession: every time I’ve made myself lunch this year, I’ve had exactly the same thing: precisely two dessert spoonfuls of kimchi, a cup of miso soup, and a small bowl of rice.

It’s new to me, this kind of repetition, but I’ve clearly got a taste for it, since my breakfasts, too, have also fallen into a pattern: I’ve got so used to my daily bowl of porridge with banana and oat milk and my cup of black coffee, now, that I don’t feel quite right if I start the day with anything else. And now I’m starting to wonder: could this happen with wine, too?

It seems unlikely. One of the great joys of wine for me is the sheer number of different labels on sale around the world at any given time. It’s hard to get a handle on precisely how many, but given there are, according to the most conservative estimates, at least 100,000 commercial wineries currently operating across the vinous world, that very few of these producers confine their efforts to making just one wine a year, that most make several, quite a few make dozens, and that they may have several different vintages of each wine circulating in the market… well, it all adds up to a number that even the clanking analogue calculating machine writing these words can see quickly runs into the millions.

Most of these wines don’t make it outside the region, let alone the country, where they are produced. But a surprisingly high proportion end up in the UK, which, while not quite as diverse a wine-buying place as it once was (thanks in no small part to the increased costs and bureaucratic obstacles erected for importers post-Brexit) is still the world’s second-largest wine importer.

We make increasingly good wine here, too. But even now almost everything (99%) comes from overseas, and the average British wine drinker’s taste is as remarkably catholic as ever. Even the most stolid of British supermarket wine ranges will routinely feature wines from at least a dozen countries made by dozens of producers from dozens of different grape varieties, while the self-consciously adventurous specialist the Wine Society has wines from 32 countries, made from more than 130 grape varieties. When it comes to wine-drinking if nothing else, the British are among the most open-minded and cosmopolitan in the world.

The only logical response to all this tantalising variety, I’ve always thought, was promiscuity. When you’ve got a whole world of wine to choose from, why not explore it? Even when I’ve got into a particular style, region or grape variety, I’ve always been curious to see how it is expressed by different producers in different places; and on any different day, a change in the weather, food, or mood has always meant a change in the wine I’d like to have with it. Wines, it has always seemed to me, are more like books than food: only a very few are worth drinking/reading twice.

Looking back at the notebooks I keep of wines I’ve drunk over the past year, I can see just a handful I’ve had more than once, all with good reason. There were a couple of supermarket bargains that I tend to reach for if I’m in a hurry at my two nearest supermarkets: the always-excellent Chilean red Tesco Finest Peumo Carmenère 2023 (£9), and the summery Waitrose Blueprint Dry German Riesling 2024 (£7.60). There was a pair of bottles of the darkly spicy, elemental Domaine Alain Voge Cornas Les Vieilles Vignes 2010 from a case of six I’d bought in 2012 and which are at a lovely moment in their life. And then there was Equipo Navazos I Think Manzanilla NV (£16.95, 37.5cl, Cambridge Wine), a dry sherry that, I’ll confess to finding so salty, savoury and sea-breezily drinkable, I got through six half-bottles in a single happy month.