How does your partner/SO fit into your wine life?

WINE TALK
21

We keep our finances separate so that part is easy. I buy all the wine.

Since he has a very low alcohol tolerance I buy and open a lot more Spatlese and Auslese than in the past (which we both love) but will occasionally open a red with steak or lamb which he’ll have a small sip of. He has a very good palate. Though he doesn’t bother to remember names he’ll sometimes say “didn’t we have this wine last month?” when I open a second bottle of something and when I tried him on a 9% Kabinett instead of a 7% Spatlese he took one sip and said “this is much higher in alchohol”.

Fortunately he likes a lot of my wine friends (no surprise, good people there), some of whom have become at least as much his friends as mine. So he gets more involved in the food end of any parties we have and is willing to go out with me if there will be other SOs present and the talk won’t be all wine related.

22

She loves wine - maybe more than I do. She has an excellent palate - probably better than I do. If she could, she’d drink Burgundy daily. I would too. Her favorite wine is Raveneau Chablis. Hard to argue with that.

The difference between us is that she doesn’t geek out over wine, although she does very much enjoy drinking great wines from places we’ve visited and hearing about the producers. She would never post on a bulletin board (wine or otherwise) in a million years.

Financially, we have joint everything - bank account, CCs, etc. She is fine with spending money on wine. We both are fairly successful in keeping our expenses in check, which is absolutely necessary with law school loans, a toddler, a new house, and another kid on the way.

23

I’m even further down this path … My wife doesn’t drink alcohol … Period.

She will attend functions with my wine-geek friends ONLY if they are not wine-focused and she knows several of their wives will be attending as well.

Some of my wine-geek friends have yet to meet my wife. If not for a singular event I held at our house, they all may have thought I made her up :slight_smile:

24

There seems to be a fairly common theme here, and one in which my wife and I fall squarely into…

I am the buyer/geek of the house, and while she really enjoys wine, and mentions how good the “better” bottles I open are, she doesn’t really care if she is drinking a $12 Cotes du Rhone or nice premier cru Burg. That is why I occasionally get (mildly) criticized for some of my expenditures, and just last night when I mentioned wanting an offsite storage locker she got kind of upset and didn’t understand “why we need more than 200 bottles?”

She also has a pretty good palate, especially considering she very rarely reads or researches anything wine related, and mostly relies on my very modest amount of knowledge for all of her info. Our preferences align fairly well, as she enjoys many of the old world or restrained styles that I do, and now seeks those types of wine out on the rare occasion when she is shopping.

If I could just convince her that a collection somewhere in the 500-600 bottle range is “normal”!! I’m not sure I will ever be able to pull that one off, but I would be very interested to see how others have sold their S/O on something similar.

25

She let me go to Bern’s. Twice.

[give_heart.gif]

26

My SO will drink an entire Rhone up, if I don’t get a big pour first.

But on the flip side, they hardly will touch whites, especially German stuff.

The SO has been surprisingly tolerant considering all the constraints my storage needs have imposed on our life.

27

Don’t tell her it’s normal, tell her it’s very very small and she is lucky you aren’t crazy like some of the wine-geeks out there! :wink:

28

Mine loves to drink the wine she doesn’t know I bought.

29

You don’t have a cask of Sherry down there, do you?

30

I went to Napa/Sonoma with my wife when we first met in 1999. She taught me good wine. Our vacations, and many of our friend interactions, center on wine and wine tastings. As our cellar’s average price has doubled, I was recently astonished when we were sharing a bottle of Patine’, and she asked how much it cost per bottle - when I said $60, she shocked me when she stated that was about average these day! I think as Paul commented above, the only thing my wife does not like is the amount of wine/money in our cellar (she lovingly calls it a “store”) - we are pushing 800 bottles with pending deliveries, which is more than three years’ of wine if we stopped buying completely. She wants to save for retirement. I keep telling her our wine is an investment - then we drink it!

[drinkers.gif]

31

You should put her on a diet so you can gain additional storage space.

32

Hah believe me I’ve already tried that one and she said they (ya’ll) are crazy too :stuck_out_tongue:

In all seriousness, one of my arguments has been that collecting wine is no different than spending thousands of dollars every year on some other hobby, be it hunting, golf, fishing, etc. That has worked to some extent, but she then likens it to hoarding and says at the point you need offsite storage it is too much. To which my reply was “then we’ll build a cellar at home whenever we move into a bigger house”. I actually got very little blowback on that one.

33

For me, my wife has become synonymous with my wine life. She loves wine, has an excellent palate, can appreciate everything from AFWE to new world bombs to stickies and everything in between. I’m the geek - I’m the one who reads, researches, posts, and does 99.9% of the buying. But she can tell the difference between a $12 Cotes-du-Rhone and a $50 St. Joseph, and therefore she has less of a problem with our wine expenditures than if that weren’t the case.
\When we vacation, wine is a primary factor in the destination - either they need to be a wine producing region (preferably) or there needs to be access to decent wine - we’re both totally aligned on that front.
Why synonymous? Because now I really don’t want to drink any of the prized wines in my collection if she’s not participating, or really, anything that’s not a cellar defender. I won’t do it. If she’s not drinking (like right now since she’s pregnant with our 3rd), the good stuff just plain doesn’t come out, since I can’t enjoy it with her. Nothing but cellar defenders for 9 months straight. Or some good beer, or cognac.
Anyways, that’s my story…

34

100% yes. My wife is pregnant now as well, so with very rare exceptions (guests/dinner parties, mainly), it’s beer and Scotch for me. Essentially every good bottle I drink is with my wife over a meal, or with my wife and friends over a meal. One of the things I love most about having wine is that we can make any occasion special by opening a bottle with some significance to us, and (at least I tell myself) we may ultimately save money by buying wine because the desire to open something good at home in many cases eliminates our desire to eat out (no BYO in TX for the most part).

35

My wine hobby costs more than my women hobby. Plus, my wine is happier wine I put it in a dark place and ignore it for long periods of time. Can’t say the same about the women.

36

My wife is awesome. Loves wine, but doesn’t geek out about it, and our palates align pretty well. She never says a thing about money I spend, including the wine cellar we put in last year.

37

This is pretty accurate for us. She has a more hedonistic approach, not trying to be analytical, but is still pretty strong in the blind tasting department. If she particularly likes something (whether cheap or not), she’ll say, “We should definitely get more of this.”

My only real constraint in terms of buying wine is having somewhere to put it. As long as I’m good there, she just waits for a PNP. I’ve been acquiring at a furious rate lately (Thanks, WB!) but have about 250-300 left of capacity…

38

This is our story, except it was the mid 80s. We came home and proceeded to drink about six cases of late 70s/early 80s CA Cab I had stashed away. After marriage, a kid, a house, and all that we continued to drink wine, but the $15 bottles were “good” wines. Bought a timeshare in Napa in 2011 (kid is grown) and haven’t stopped since. Travel for us is wine, food, sightseeing, in that order. Except for his twice yearly scuba trips.

I do 95% of the buying, he does about 70% of the drinking. He’s always happy when I make food that goes with Zin. He is a General Contractor, so he’s been pretty creative about figuring out ways to store the stash. No place to put a cellar in our current home, and no off site storage in our area so it becomes a challenge. That Patine is particularly tricky to store.

39

LOL! Those Patine bottles look bottles look great but my Eurocave rack doesn’t like that rubber band. [head-bang.gif]

40

had my first “tone it down” conversation with my fiancee just two nights ago. 4 offlines in 5 nights, plus a trip to the Mosel two weeks ago. i deserved it.

we’re unsure how we’ll deal with “hobby finances” once we’re married…when i’ve shown her receipts from various purchases, she’s been shocked.

hitsfan