This is a legitimate topic in the journey of “collecting”.
I started out in the early ‘90’s drinking CA Zin’s . I remember the days of going to ZAP fest at Fort Mason. Talk about a shit show. You walk in, baguette in one hand and wine glass in the other. Everyone would bee line to Turley. Two hours later, purple hand and lips!
I then graduated to CA cabs, in mid 90’s. There was a message board back in those days - wino depot” , where you learned of Myriad, Realm etc… I remember Juan Mercado’s number being shared on the site. We were at Kuleto house one night for dinner enjoying a bottle of Realm. My client was blown away. I asked, would you like to meet the owner? Next day we’re drinking with Juan at Chateau Boswell, sorry I digress, well a 1,000 bottles later of CA cab, my tastes changed toward Red burg’s and playing with Bdx. I am sorry that I didn’t get in to Burgs earlier as I was blinded by CA cabs.,
I’ve just held onto the out of favor wines and am glad that I didn’t buy too heavily on them when I first got into it. I take the view that there’s always that itch that needs to be scratched, so it’s nice to have a go with the bigger wines on occasion.
I never really got too big into Aussie Shiraz and bruiser cabs, though I definitely had a rich Pinot period. I just loved Brunellos and Barolo from the beginning and those have stayed while my palate has shifted towards a ton of Champagne for the last decade and more recently towards Rioja and Rias Baixas. I’m lucky I got into it in my late-20s and am now in my mid-40s.
I posted on another thread that the 2013 The Mascot is very tannic and I’m not sure that my current 70-yr old palate and this style are currently aligned.
Given that I have some younger friends (well, my daughters’ friends) whose tastes run more in this style (as did mine at a younger age) I will open them whenever anyone under age 40 is in the room.
For me, it took about 5-8 years of tasting all sorts of wines to figure out what I really liked. Or least refined what I liked. And then I started buying more and more of those wines. But the last decade plus has been fairly stagnant.
But I think that is not because my taste stopped changing but because I get “locked in” to spring/fall releases from various CA mailing lists and releases of some European (mainly French) wines. I stopped tasting as widely as I did in the first 5-8 years when I was really getting into wine. And, as someone noted above, there is so much out there. And I now feel like I am missing out. I am sure there are, for example, wines for Oregon, South Africa and New Zealand (to name three places where I have had a wine or two that I liked but never dived that deeply into).
A good analogy might be music. People usually think the best music is music from their late teens through their 20’s. And as they (OK, we - including me) get older, they (we) stop listening to newer music and our taste stagnates. Thus, I now barely recognize, for example, any of the artists performing at the Grammy Awards.
(On a perhaps related note, I wish those damn kids would get off my lawn!)