The Significance of Age

When it comes to wine, age is a crucial dimension of our relationship with it. The vintage itself matters because it tells us something about the weather that year, but a wine’s aging potential carries even greater significance. It directly influences how much value we assign to the wine.

The traditional equation is: The greater the quality, the greater the aging potential.

We quite simply judge the wine by how old it can become. How well it endures and is cared for in the cellar through decades until the right moment arrives. Only then do we open it and enjoy its depth, while reflecting on the year it came from — seeing life in a broader perspective.

A wine of that caliber gives us a sense of weight and wisdom, and perhaps even gratitude for being able to enjoy a piece of nature in such a refined form. There is something poetically elegant about it that connects us to the larger whole of which we are only a small part.

At the same time, we celebrate winemakers whose families go back generations, and thus the know-how that has been passed down. It matters to us that great winemaking ability is built over a long time and did not simply appear overnight.

In other words, we honor age in the world of wine. Which is why it may seem surprising that our behavior is the exact opposite when it comes to people.

Old is a no-go

With a few cultural exceptions, we generally do not like getting old, and in many parts of the world — not least here in the Nordic countries — we even look down on older people in various contexts.

Take the labor market, for example. The moment we pass 50, our professional market value drops — unless we hold a role where the weight of age is essential, or we have managed to carve out a niche that makes us indispensable.

In the vast majority of cases, however, that is not the situation. I have several times witnessed older people being written off professionally because they “aren’t quick enough”, “don’t understand the technology” or simply “think old-fashioned”.

When we look at our beauty culture, it too is marked by a downright fear of aging. We must absolutely not have wrinkles or grey hair, and we should preferably be in the physical shape of a 24-year-old despite being more than twice that age.

In fact, the ideal is that in this version of ourselves we are also able to socialize with young people and impress them with our “youthful mindset” as a kind of proof that we haven’t really grown old.

Overall, there is a tendency to only manage aging by pretending it isn’t happening. Because age is just a number, as the mantra goes.

Depth, wisdom and transformation

No, it isn’t.

Age is experience, insight and wisdom tied to more or less the same human processes that have always existed to make life function as well as possible.

It is the ability to handle our survival in a way that benefits the whole — including future generations. It is also being able to love another person even when it is challenging. And occasionally recognizing that, despite the love, one has had one’s time together.

Age is bringing new life into the world and growing inwardly as a person because one has contributed to the evolutionary process. Not least in the form of being able to let go of one’s children when the time comes and allowing them to find their own path in life even though they make mistakes.

Above all, age is the ability to transform an external presence in life into an internal one. A kind of concentrated awareness of what truly matters and why it makes a difference. A state that allows new thought-seeds to sprout and grow into new works, projects and visions — either through oneself or through others who become inspired.

Age is seeing the value of life in the grand perspective of time, but that requires us to let it mean something. Otherwise the fullness of age is lost in the same way as if we dropped a vintage bottle on the floor.

The loss of ourselves

My big question is therefore: Why do we not honor age in people the same way we do with wine?

We simply devalue the human maturation process from a certain age onwards — and thereby lose ourselves. Imagine if we did the same with wine!

Our relationship with enjoyment of life through this unique agricultural product would become two-dimensional, and we would lose our understanding of time’s influence on it. Our entire perspective would change, and so would our goals.

For example, the desire to produce wines with great aging potential would disappear, and we would no longer seek the long-term symbiosis with nature. Only short-term solutions would find room, and the quality of wines would decline until we had forgotten how to make truly great ones.

Even worse, we would become even more dependent on expensive and energy-intensive technological processes instead of relying on nature’s organic processes, which in themselves cost nothing.

New drinking habits

In several ways, this scenario is already playing out. Right now we see younger generations preferring wines that are fresh and lower in alcohol. They want drinkable wines without heavy oak aging, and they have no interest in waiting years for them to mature.

For them, wine is not an old bottle from the cellar ritually opened with reverence at the family Sunday dinner. It is more likely a 1–3-year-old wine with low alcohol content that suits a bit of socializing with friends after work.

By comparison, I recently spoke with an Italian winemaker who said that the tradition in Italy is to make a wine when one’s daughter is born — and then it is ready to drink when she gets married.

Of course young people must have space to do something completely different from what they were raised with — otherwise they would not be true to what it means to be young. And as long as it is only youth culture that embraces the trend of wines without long aging, there is no real danger.

But if that trend spreads to older generations, or if the younger generations carry it with them as they grow older, then the world of wine will have lost crucial ground.

A paradox?

Personally, I see a connection in our relationship with time — and ultimately with the value of age. Whether it concerns wine, people or something else entirely, we seem to have somehow dismantled time as an advantage and turned it into a disadvantage instead.

Perhaps as a result of industrialization and its close cousin, technological development? Everything must go faster and preferably become easier all the time. Have we adapted to this development so completely that we have forgotten along the way what it means to be human?

If so, we find ourselves in a paradox — because at the same time we constantly talk about how important it is to be authentic. We even celebrate authentic products such as wine made by traditional methods.

Could it be that in our digital age we have lost the ability to be analog, and that we therefore try to buy our way to it — yet we are so far removed from our understanding of the analog world that we cannot give it the time it needs to manifest in life?

Because the fact is that nature’s processes take time, and we cannot force them without sacrificing quality. Even with the best technology to imitate nature’s processes, a certain depth will be missing — a depth that can only come from one place: time.

We experience this more clearly in wine than in most other places, since it is a living product from beginning to end. Precisely for that reason, wine serves as a good mirror for how we refine what it means to be human.

Perhaps we should start by assigning greater significance to age.