MANILA, Philippines?According to mom, as a young boy, I used to drop a splash of Coke in my 7-Up to add some color in my drink every time we went out for dinner. I was said to have pretended that my soda was a glass of wine, and I also used the round dinner plate as my steering wheel. I would sometimes even use the fork as my column shift (this was the ?70s), pretending to be a race driver. Sporting my first mechanical timepiece, an Ingersoll Mickey Mouse watch, I felt that I was on top of the world instead of a booster chair. I believe a large number of us did this at some point in our boyhood.

Decades later, I?m still doing the same thing, albeit with real steering wheels, wearing 40-year-old mechanical watches (yahoo for eBay!) and, on special occasions, enjoying a glass or two of real wine. So when Inquirer asked me to come up with a male-oriented luxury lifestyle issue, I immediately jumped at the chance. (However, we have barely scratched the surface due to lack of editorial space.) This issue we will be sharing with you stories about Wheels, Wines and Wristwatches.

This visually driven repertoire is about a wish list where the reader gets a pen and checks the tick box on what the world has to offer.

In this section, we will discover how the golden age of the automobile in the Philippines has faded. Now, foreign car collectors have gotten hold of vintage cars from the Philippines. Worse, junk and scrap metal dealers cash in on the cars.

It doesn?t end on a sad note, though. Realizing that maturing baby boomers also have maturing stock options and trust funds, car manufacturers are turning back the clock to retro-inspired cars reminiscent of a bygone automotive era.

Inquirer motoring journalist Tessa Salazar tells us how car manufacturers are going back to their drawing boards and modeling clays, digging up their automotive gene pool, cloning their successful models and transforming them to fully equipped (and with better emission controls) modern-day sports cars but giving them a retro-inspired visual treatment.

In this issue, we also treat you to stories on timepieces with motoring themes. Luxury watch houses have seen a common denominator between high-end mechanical and complicated timepieces and high-performance cars. As sports cars are considered the pinnacle of automotive development, we see a growing number of watch houses developing complicated watches commemorating relevant motoring themes and co-branding with pedigreed luxury car makers. All these and more as we take you along on a drive in this week?s Sunday Lifestyle Exclusives.