For Saintsbury's taste in wine was classic, tending perhaps towards a certain narrowness. He relished very good champagne (almost the first wine he bought for his cellar was an 1865 Krug). His taste in claret was a shade more flexible. The first growths, of course, he appreciated deeply. But he was no slave to the 1855 classification. The claret he writes about with greatest fondness is a second growth, Léoville Barton; and he goes out of his way to praise Ch. Citran, a sound Médoc cru bourgeois, but one he bought and drank in very large quantities. Sauternes was Yquem, Coutet, or La Tour Blanche, and those wines alone — no Rieussec, or Climens, or Suduiraut. Overall, his palate in Bordeaux led him to the left bank and away from the Merlot-dominated wines of the hinterland. St.-Emilion he frankly admits never to have cared for, and Pomerol he seems never to have bought, perhaps even never to have drunk. 

In Burgundy, Saintsbury's preferences were for the wines that still today command the most fearsome prices: Romanée Conti, Richebourg, Montrachet, La Tâche, Musigny. Corton he loftily referred to as "humble", Clos Vougeot he thought over-rated, and Chambertin (more puzzlingly) he would wave away: "The fact is that it has never been a favourite of mine. It may be blasphemous to call it ‘coarse', but it seems to me that it ‘doth something grow to coarseness' . . . It was Napoleon's favourite; and the fact rather ‘speaks' its qualities, good and not so good." 

But in the other French wine-growing regions, Saintsbury found little to please him. Hermitage he revered as "the manliest French wine", and he rather charmingly makes the mistake of referring to the great Condrieu, Ch. Grillet, as "white Hermitage" — certainly a compliment and probably, in his eyes, a promotion. But the other wines of the Rhône valley he could esteem as nothing more than "beverage wines". From the white wines of the Loire, he turned away without regret ("I never cared much for the wines of Anjou, Touraine, and their vicinage, either sparkling or still"); and he never so much as mentions red Loire, such as Chinon. German wines he would drink only "for curiosity's sake". Chianti he grudgingly allowed "can be drunk", but other Italian wines he viewed with aversion. Sparkling Lacrima Christi, grown on the volcanic slopes of Vesuvius, he memorably condemned as tasting of "ginger beer alternately stirred up with a stick of chocolate and a large sulphur match". He claimed to be, in respect of wine, "a (very minor) Ulysses, steering ever from the known to the unknown", but there is surely some self-flattery here. Saintsbury never really dropped far below the horizon of his vinous Ithacas: Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne.