But quite often the wines we enjoyed the most aren't the great, expensive bottles at all. Even a modest bottle of wine sometimes lives on in your memory - not because of its taste but because of the circumstances in which it was drunk.
Bottles with memories attached are more valuable than a Penfolds Grange.
My first great wine experience was a visit to a cellar door in the Hunter Valley on a long bushwalking trip in the university holidays. My friends and I were 18 years old, grubby and oenologically clueless, but the woman at the cellar door of the boutique winery Briar Ridge sat us down in the barrel-lined tasting room, produced a plate of cheese and talked us through their range. Over an hour, she poured generously and gave us our first-ever lesson about wine. We pooled our change to buy one solitary bottle of cabernet merlot and carried it back to our camp site as if it was a precious relic.
That night, on the camp stove, we prepared a special meal of creamy ham pasta in its honour (forgoing our typical supper of three-minute noodles and powdered cheese) and opened the bottle. It was infanticide, of course, but we savoured every drop. It was tannic, full of sun and baked earth, and the vanillan oak made it far richer than anything I'd ever tried out of a cask. My tastes have evolved since then but it remains my seminal wine experience. I keep returning to Briar Ridge when I'm in the Hunter - not in search of that potent flavour, but to thank them for their generosity towards four penniless wine novices.
When you drink wine, you're imbibing much more than the fruits of the vigneron's labour: the company, the conversation, the food, the candlelight and whatever emotions you are experiencing that day all contribute to the enjoyment. Wine is certainly more than the sum of its parts.
And, like fragrance, it's a potent trigger for memories.
The wines you open at special events in your life - an engagement, a birth or an anniversary - become part of your life story. I've kept some bottles of the 1999 Allanmere (now First Creek) shiraz served at my wedding, and every one I've opened since takes me back in time. It's not an extraordinary wine, it wasn't expensive and certainly not rare, but that's not the point. The occasion elevated it to greatness.
Which is why sometimes, when we return to a bottle at the centre of a cherished recollection, the taste stubbornly refuses to match our memory.
A few years ago I shared a bottle of Brown Brothers Orange Muscat & Flora with two of my dearest girlfriends. We were all in the same city for a rare weekend together, and took the bottle into the back garden with a loaf of organic pumpkin-flavoured bread and some cheeses. The combination of Meg and Karen's company and the dappled sunlight contributed to elevating the flavour of the honey-coloured nectar to something magical. I've brought home the same bottle of wine over the years since that afternoon, but it tastes flat and cloying every time. I can't re-create the flavour. Sentiment is more powerful than the mere contents of the bottle.
Then there was the T'Gallant Celia's White Pinot I had on a picnic date sitting high above Bronte on the sandstone cliffs. It was a revelation at the time, but it never tasted as sublime without the sea air and the first-date butterflies.
Such is the flipside of the extraordinary alchemy wine undergoes in certain circumstances - and of our cherished wine experiences of the past. We can't always re-create them, but this romantic chase after past pleasures makes wine appreciation very personal.
Wine writers may rank the best drops and point us towards the bargains, but they tell only part of the story.
What are the great wine experiences (not necessarily great wines) haunting your memory?
This post originally appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald.
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