Advice for someone just starting out

WINE TALK
21

Separate out the concepts of cellaring wine and drinking wine in your head. I would only cellar wine that I’ve tasted, but I’m fairly liberal about buying wine to try now and see if I like their style. At this stage, if you look at the cellar and realize that you haven’t tried half the producers in the cellar, you’re probably doing it wrong. (That may be OK later on once you know a producer well, you may want to let their young vintages age while you drink the older ones.)

I would aim to grow your cellar slowly. If you’re at 150 and aiming for 1000, plan to add about 50 bottles a year at most. You’ll be at your goal within a decade, and you won’t have nearly as many duds as you would if you did that in 2-3 years.

And I would emphasize what others have mentioned: taste great wines that aren’t expensive. If you find that you love Prum, or Huet, or Loire Cabernet franc, you have saved yourself a lot of money. The flip side is true too: If you find that you really love Krug champagne or aged bordeaux over cheaper stuff, then buy one bottle of that over a case of cheaper wines that you’re not as passionate about. You’ll be happy later on when you have too much wine: quantity is everyone’s ultimate issue in wine, no one is worried that the wines in their cellar are too good.

Lastly, people are incredibly generous on the boards. Make friends from here that you can meet up with. Some people will open incredible wines that they bought when they were more affordable, and I would have never been able to try them otherwise.

1 Like
22

Orange County, CA :slight_smile:

23

Having High Time as your local shop will get you father faster, what a great place to be able to frequent. I have found traveling to the places you get a deeper sense of what the wines are. I would say early on split your buying budget in half and use the rest for travel.

Find reviewers who have similar tasting notes to the ones you would write and subscribe. Its the next best thing to travel in regards to getting more info about the place and the people. Use can use cellar tracker for similar likes as well, its not as reliable but it only takes a small donation. Any subscriptions you would get will integrate with it as well.

Have fun, drink what you like, if its cheap buy 2!

1 Like
24

Hi Time and winex are nice wine shops in Orange County.

1 Like
25

+1 here, I so subscribe to this. If you really want to know, then investing a few hundred dollars to drink what is ends up being a few thousand dollars, you’ll learn incredibly fast.

1 Like
26

Two questions:

  1. Are these suckers bone-dry?
  2. Where is the best place to buy them?
27

This may have been said, but try to balance the desire to cellar wine for aging with some caution about buying too heavily into one region early on. Many people’s preferences change immensely over time, and some day you might realize you have 300 bottles of wine you don’t really have any interest in consuming, and which are of questionable liquidation value.

Don’t be put off by language barriers in wine. We’re talking about relatively few languages here, and even if you butcher some place and producer names, wine people are used to it and won’t care, after all, they’re in this to enjoy wine, or to make it and sell it, not to teach their native tongues. If you like French wine dive into it. It won’t make you fluent in French but you’ll manage well enough. The same goes for other regions, and, for that matter, for “difficult” wine terms. Often people complain that some region’s descriptions are confusing, but if you are really interested you’ll find that the designations, regions, etc. are quite manageable.

Another difficult balancing act is cost. In this thread alone I’ve seen advice to sample a lot of wine and to buy fewer but better wines. That sounds like a recipe for spending a lot more money unless you have both the time and the access to attend a lot of large tastings. Alternatively, I suggest finding the regions and styles you really like and then focus on buying somewhat better examples. In my opinion Europe offers much better value than CA, even if you are located in CA. Oregon also offers good value. You may reach different conclusions for your tastes. To some, the experience of having personal relationships with producers is half the fun, and value be damned. I am not one of those people. My life doesn’t lend itself to hanging out in wine country very often, so I look for quality and value that suits my budget and needs.

IMO, tasting wine with good food will do more to open your eyes than tasting five times as much wine in a commercial tasting setting. This can be difficult with young kids, I know, but work it in when you can because I think it will point you towards where your cellar needs to go in the future. Some people drink wine primarily with food. My meals are primarily with little kids and usually with work and/or running still to be done in a day, so most of my meals are not accompanied by wine. Even so, the wine I like best tends to go best with food, and some wines I like I only drink with the appropriate foods because they don’t really seem as enjoyable on their own. Also, I’m not saying you need to belabor the concept of wine pairing, but enjoy the wine you love with the food you love and I think you will learn a lot from that exercise.

Make sure to drink white wine and rose. It seems that when starting out people ignore white wine, only to often later express that it was a mistake to do so. This also goes back to the point about food. White wine and rose are versatile at the table, much more so than (most) reds. Oh, Champagne should be added to that list as well.

1 Like
28

This: “Taste as many wines as you can”

Over-taste. Under-buy.

One thing that helped me with tasting was trying to get lots of reps on 100% varietal stuff to understand the grapes. Also, tasting the same varietal from different countries and regions is a wonderful way to begin noticing stylistic and geographic differences.

At first I did not want to taste weird anomaly blends as much as benchmarks of grapes or regions I hadn’t tried (i.e. a 100% varietal or something from a region that is very typical expression of that grape or region). That gave me a clear backdrop to understand the other anomaly wines, blends, etc. How could I understand what a ‘new world’ version of a pinot noir was if I didn’t know what pinot noir itself ‘usually’ tasted like in various places? Tasting benchmarks of grapes and places was my Rosetta Stone, so to speak.

Also, WineFolly.com is a good place to get beginner-to-intermediate level knowledge about different grapes and regions. She keeps it simple and approachable.

Finally, if you want to connect for tastings or a group let me know as I’m in the LA area. In fact, we have a rookie offline coming up on Saturday April 15th here in Santa Monica.

p.s. - it’s confusing when I skim WB and see “Bryan Price” because at a glance it looks like my name!

1 Like
29

This was good advice from AAgrawal:
“I would aim to grow your cellar slowly. If you’re at 150 and aiming for 1000, plan to add about 50 bottles a year at most. You’ll be at your goal within a decade, and you won’t have nearly as many duds as you would if you did that in 2-3 years.”

Think about it, if you usually drink 150 bottles per year, then if you start buying 200 bottles a year just for your cellar you’ll be screwed when all of those drinking windows start ending and you have 500 over the hill wines in your cellar because you can’t drink them fast enough. When buying, consider staggering when those drinking windows will hit so they aren’t all in sync.

1 Like
30

Taste a lot, but also read tasting notes for those wines.
So when you see descriptors like cola, pepper, vanilla, you can match those up with your personal experiences.
I’ve had non wino friends say “that’s a good wine, but I don’t know what I am tasting”. Sometimes it helps to see what others have identified.
From there you’ll gravitate to what you like and enjoy.

1 Like
31

Great post! I wish I had asked this question 20 years ago when I was you. There’s already some fantastic advice on this thread, and I may repeat some of that and add some new:

  1. If you plan to build a cellar or other wine storage, calculate what you think might be the most bottles you’ll ever own, then multiply that by three or four.
  2. Don’t buy anything based on a critic’s notes.
  3. Don’t fall for the hype on any wine or vintage. The “vintage of the century” comes several times every decade.
  4. 20 years into this adventure, I wish I had bought more high-end wines and less mid range or every day drinkers. However, things might be a little different for you today, as many high-end wines have become astronomically priced. You need to find a balance between every day drinkers, and wines to lay down. There are some wines that accomplish both; examples include Olga Raffault Chinon, Pepierre Briords Muscadet, Huet Vouvray, Lopez de Herredia Rioja Reservas, Felsina or Monsanto Chianti Classico Riservas, to name a few, as well as the above mentioned 2015 German Rieslings. (but don’t fall for the hype!)
  5. Don’t ignore champagne. There are still some spectacular bottles that are very age worthy, and priced much lower than top notch Burgundies or Bordeaux.
  6. I agree with the suggestion above to buy some older wines and see what you like with some age
  7. Don’t join any wine clubs that send you a certain amount of varied wines a month or a year
  8. It’s great to find some producers that you like and join their wine list, but don’t go overboard, and don’t buy too much.
  9. Don’t trophy hunt, and don’t speculate.
  10. I don’t know who Matt is, but his recommendations for specific wines are spot on. I would add to that list some good producers of Cru Beaujolais, such as Lapierre, Foillard, Coudert, many others.
  11. Look for birth year wines for your kids, for your wife and for yourself. Anniversary wines are fun. These need to have a proven track record for aging. My wife and I have opened a bottle of 1996 Calon Segur on our anniversary for at least the past 15 years. The wine, like our marriage, is still getting better.

Maybe I’ll have time to add to this later, but I’m a working stiff and have to go earn a living…

Cheers,
Warren

1 Like
32

this. never have enough of the former… always endless supply of the latter.

Have fun with it… that’s the whole point of it after all…

1 Like
33

Maybe we’re distantly related? I’m always down to meet up but my wife has a busy work schedule so I have to move heaven and earth sometimes to make date work. I can do something eventually with more notice, thanks for the offer!

34

echoing the advice to taste, taste and taste some more. Even when you think you know what you like, keep tasting. There is too much wine out there to get a thorough understanding, so every now and again something will hit your glass and make you go “wow!”. That will often develop a whole new angle, as you try more wines from the same region / grape / style.

FWIW I found it easier to try to get to grips with a single country (or in my case a pair - Australia and NZ) before venturing out, and (again FWIW) I buy relatively little from either these days. This may sound like a mistake, but it wasn’t. In enjoyed that part of my journey, but then Italy came along, I got a bit more into France (you can never avoid it here), and now Spain and Portugal are being explored more than I had done. Other little pockets of interest are tentatively investigated, or are there as long term moderate interests. In summary, it ebbs and flows over time and even an initial big focus on one region can lead to a big cellar re-alignment over time, as long as you don’t buy hundreds and hundreds of a specific wine style, that then takes a while to get through.

Only buy what you’ve tasted? A great idea, but it can be impractical unless you have multiple tasting groups and go to lots of tasting events. Certainly if you taste something and like it, then buy it. You don’t need anyone else’s opinion. However it might be that you read a tasting note here, or a friend suggests you try a particular wine, or you wonder what Muscadet actually tastes like and whether it’s the wine you should have when eating seafood. In that case go out and grab a bottle and try it at home with or without food (it’s good certainly to do both either by having a glass before the meal, or sitting back after the meal and having another perspective on the wine without food). A pretty high proportion of the wines I buy, I’ve not tasted that particular wine before, though the style may be familiar, so I’m more confident in doing so.

Good that you know how much you’ll get through in a year, which does give you a reasonable idea of how much to buy if you want to slowly grow the cellar e.g. if consumption is 150 bottles a year, then aiming to buy 15 cases (180 bottles) seems like a good target. It is easy to get carried away with the buying, so any control applied now should ensure you learn to say no. Also worth considering the current thread on maturity of wines, to understand whether you’re happy with relatively young wines, or need a combination of laying wines down to cellar, plus cellar defenders in the form of some older wines bought retail/auction, plus more approachable young wines to allow you to let the cellar get some age on it. Worth leaning on your father to get a few mature bottles from his cellar.

Finally

Also, I’m very much interested in buying and cellaring wines and will slowly grow my current storage capacity (~150 bottles) to hopefully closer my father’s storage capacity.

Your father can hold more than 150 bottles [wow.gif] He’s a mightily impressive gentleman [worship.gif] [wink.gif]

1 Like
35

I am so genuinely excited by this list! I know where I’m traveling the next 20 years! I wonder for those living in the US, what was your introduction to international wines?

36

Ya know he really is still doing some “heavy lifting” even at age 73. On a funny side note, he called me last night because he had a tasting in Anaheim with Three Sticks, and he got to sit next to Bob Cabral for a good portion of the night who of course was the wine maker at Williams-Selyem. He go so excited I think he went online and bought another case of wine from Three Sticks. [cheers.gif]

37

and the people side is not to be underestimated or under-rated. Wine can be the catalyst for great friendships and great memories (though too much wine can affect the latter, and far too much wine can affect the former!)

1 Like
38

Lol, that’s the worst possible advice a newbie could get. Who knows if he and wife even like Riesling, or sweet wines. And some of us think 15 is a freakish outlier vintage. At age 33 there will always be another chance down the road to buy into a region and vintage. Better advice: buy a bottle or two and see what you think of the wines, and look for opportunities to taste more broadly. If at some point you wish you had bought more of something, it’s a rare wine that can’t be found at auction. Rieslings in particular do not escalate in value.

1 Like
39

I think “tasting before buying” is a bit overrated: fine if you can do it, but no practical if you live in the hinterlands which are usually wine deserts. But for you, being in a huge urban conglomeration that is the OC, you have many chances to do that. Lucky you.

1 Like
40

High Times is a wonderful store and a great place to taste a lot of wines in short order.

While I’ve not read all the replies, I’m sure people have said don’t buy a lot of things to cellar long term until you’ve totally sorted out what you like and don’t…it will change over time. I couldn’t agree more.

And most important…taste, taste, taste. Try anything and everything and don’t be afraid to say “Not my wheelhouse”, even to what has gotten a high score. It’s about what you like, not what anyone else likes. Over time you will learn what people’s palates are close to yours and you’ll learn to trust their recommendations.

1 Like