Palate Evolution...One-way Street or Full Circle?

The other day, I was musing on the last 10 years and how my tastes of wine have changed. Like most folks, I started out drinking California wines. I started with whites, and graduated to reds. St. Supery in particular was one of my seminal wine experiences.

Then, I started hanging out with the wine crowd and fell in love with French wines, particularly Bordeaux and Rhone. I also learned that I liked aged wines much better than recently harvested babies. From there, I added Burgundies to my repertoire, then wines from Piedmont, Tuscany, and Spain, and a whole host of more obscure regions like Chinon etc.

Along the way, I lost interest in the more fruit-forward wines of California and amazingly enough, at some point, the chatter about the investment quality of Bordeaux also turned my interest away from Bordeaux and to some extent, the Rhone.

Interestingly enough, I recently drank a few Bordeaux and Rhones and it occurred to me that when I put aside the politics, my dislike for wine to be treated as an investment, my dislike for the 100 point scale, Parkerization, etc, I still believe Bordeaux and Rhone deliver more epiphany wines for me than any of the other wine growing regions in the world.

I am better today at pairing food and wine, so what I cook largely determines the wine that gets opened, so Bordeaux and Rhone aren't always on deck as often as they used to be, but when I do open them, they seem to provide fireworks more frequently than the other wines I open.

Don't get me wrong, I still love Barolo, Barbaresco, Burgundy, Brunello, and Riojas...it's just that as good as many of them are, they often just don't quite compare to the heights of an aged Bordeaux or Rhone for me.

In a way, I think my palate has come "full circle". What I mean by that is that I started out liking some things, experimented with a bunch of other wines over the years, but in the end, it seems I've landed back at where I was closer to the beginning of the journey (Interestingly, I have still not learned to re-like the majority of CA wines I used to love...so I guess this is the big exception).

I'm not done experimenting for sure, but I can't help but wonder whether palate evolution is a by-product of getting older in that you become more sure of the things you like to indulge in (wine being only one of those things).

Where in the palate evolution process are you and do you think it's a linear process or a full circle?