Time Changes

The stability of today's modern wines gives consumers far more reliability than ever. Caterina Trimarchi/Shutterstock

The old saying, “The more things change the more they stay the same,” may apply in many areas of our 2022 daily lives, but I realized recently by walking through my wine cellar how it didn’t really apply to wine.

The saying may have been prophetic a while back for things like political or economic systems or the philosophies of humor or education, but it surely doesn’t work for:

• Telephones (corded and wall-attached to cellular).
• Motion pictures (black and white and silent to color, extraordinary sound, and 3D).
• Automobiles (25 mph and hand-crank starters to 150 mph and automated parking).

A French writer by the name of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote, “Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.” But he decided to offer this bit of wisdom even before the U.S. Civil War began—and what was particularly civil about that conflict, anyway?