What ? No more Barolo ?

At a dinner at a restaurant in Perno in Piedmont in 2016 a good friend in his mid sixties announced that the 2010 vintage would categorically be the last vintage of Barolo he would buy.

While it is true that he firmly believes both that Barolo needs many years of cellaring fully to express itself and he also has a large collection of older bottles already, this comment nonetheless set me thinking. I admired the thoughtfulness and self discipline of the assertion. No such consideration had crossed my mind in relation to my own purchasing strategy, absent occasional reflection on the broader subject that perhaps I already have too much wine. 

Three considerations at least make it difficult to stop buying a category of wine altogether. 

The first is the view that wine today is simply better made than ever before. The vineyard work in particular has improved even over the last ten or so years.  So if the wines are genuinely ‘better” today, why would one forego acquiring these bottles and never taste the full and most authentic beauty of the what the vineyard can deliver - even if you have to drink it on the younger side of optimal.   

The second is - how do you feel about missing out completely on a “great” vintage ? Perhaps a few 2013 or 2016 Barolo merit purchase ?  Alex Sanchez at Brovia described to us his 2013 Barolo as perhaps a “vintage of a generation”.  2015 red Burgundy perhaps ?  How could you not when Frederic Lafarge describes it as a ‘legendary vintage” for Volnay, perhaps most resembling 1929 ?  Perhaps you will have to drink it a bit younger than might be your preference. But to miss it completely ?

And, thirdly, of course, the winegrower is still making the wine each year. So to maintain “current” the relationship with that grower, does this not require to some degree ‘following” the early development of more recent vintages ?  When you visit the Cantina one talks mostly about recent vintages.  Is one to have no opinion of these based on tasting experience ?  What does one give up when visiting a Cantina from whom you have many older bottles but none from the last five or ten vintages ? Does this somehow diminish one's ‘attachment” to the Cantina or at least the winemaker personally, which connection is surely a source of one of the greatest joys of wine collecting?

I am in my early sixties - and am rather happier drinking wines at a younger stage in their development than my only slightly older friend - but I also doubt I have the self discipline he evidently has to forego buying at least a few bottles of future vintages of Barolo !