Recently I found myself in Geneva, in a place called Vallee de Joux, on a road called, the alley of Tourbillons. As far as names go, this sounded right out of an enchanted story. The setting was no less, mind you. But the real beauties were inside, timepieces that had been created after hours of labouring over each part, obsessing over the finish of each piece, and then binding it all together with focused passion.
The result is that each watch from the house of Vacheron Constantin can last an easy part of a century, if not more.
In the world of wines, we have an interesting parallel. Some winemakers, at the very top of the game, will produce bottles that will easily outlive us all. To make a tangible potable product that we shall never know how it tastes when at its apogee is quite a feat, not to mention, an altruistic feat. Needless to add, such bottles come at a cost. They are to be considered heirloom and, like the watches mentioned above, they can only be made in restricted, limited quantities.
But the reason a Vacheron is famous is not because every person who has ever aspired to a watch has made it a point to buy one. Far from it, people who fall in love with watches start somewhere much more accessible. Perhaps our first digital watch from Casio, or similar, when we were young. It was all that was needed to fascinate us?the backlight, the changing day/date, the blinking dots, a stopwatch/timer thrown in too perhaps. At that point, the relevance or importance of a handmade VC would have not only been wasted, it would have been lost on us. We would never have understood the essence of it, even if we had the money to shell out for it.
Similarly, a lot of luxury watch brands exist in the space between a digital rubber-strap and a hand-engraved timepiece. These are brands that are not entirely handmade, but machine-finished. Brands that still involve a lot of human intervention, but perhaps not as much as certain others. The result is a good valuable timepiece that, too, will last for decades, as also bring pride and prestige to the owner, not to mention a sense of awe inspired in others who will congratulate the wearer on his fine taste. It is these brands that will create the future client for a super-expensive product of haute-horlogerie.
Now, back to wines, the same parallel runs true. It isn?t that we all wake up one day and find ourselves wanting to drink an expensive 20-year-old bottle of Bordeaux. Instead, we all begin somewhere, more affordably comfortable. This could be an entry-level oak-chipped bottle from Australia, or a simple fruity wine from Italy or south of France. They will be all the wine we ever need at that point in our gustative evolution. After several trials, we may be tempted by something a bit more complex and pricier by when our palate would have considerably evolved and we may be able to tell what makes a wine more expensive and sought after than another. This process can take years or decades, till one day, we find ourselves in a position to better appreciate the more expensive stuff.
The point is that there is nothing wrong with drinking cheap wines. If anything, it is the only way we shall ever learn to appreciate finer wines. Reminds me of that poem, ?Victory is sweetest to those who have lost?? but then, I think I am out of space and analogies for now. In short: drink now, drink well?and wear a fine watch!
?The writer is a sommelier