The recent thread on the discovery of a wooden box full of wine in the back of a member’s cellar includes the word ‘small’ when he refers to his cellar, which is around 1000 bottles. I’m just less than half of that, and my wife seems to think that my cellar is gigantic, and that there’s no way I could ever drink all the wine that’s in it now, say nothing for the continual replenishing of bubbles and Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay (as that’s all she drinks, so unless we want to open two bottles, that’s most of what I drink!)
I’ll add a poll, but wonder what constitutes a ‘big’ cellar, what number? Presumably it’s far different between we winos and the general public, i.e. my definition and Jen’s, but let’s, for the sake of this poll, outline what is a ‘big cellar’ in wino terms…
I have no doubt that a good percentage of folks here have cellars in the 2500-5000+ range, so for me 10k was also the vote. I know at least 3 people who have multiple cellars/storage who own 10-20k+ btls…
So, I will go with “Tow story, or larger” cellar size for ‘large!’
Numbers-wise…a big cellar is always bigger than what someone already has, so I will go with the 10K answer to be officially ‘big.’
When I had 70 bottles at the bottom of a basement closet as a young teen, I thought 100 bottles would be a ‘big’ cellar,’ so my notion of ‘big’ has evolved.
You can’t drink down 500 bottles? In your lifetime? I’m at 1,500, and I’m going to drink mine down, except for the crap stuff I’m leaving for my wake and the next dude. I figure I have about 6 years of inventory at this point.
As Einstein would point out, it is all relative. If you drink 1-2 bottles/week then 500 is probably a big cellar. If you drink 1-2 bottles/day then something on the order of 3,000 bottles or more would be what one would consider big.
Not a ‘young’ teen, but at 19 I had run into ‘good’ wine and had an ‘older’ girlfriend who could buy wine and I started putting some down, thinking how cool it would be to be able to pull a wine on the spur of the moment. I still have several of them left.
Off the top of my head…I still have a '73 Caymus pinot, a '75 Mondavi pinot, a Bollinger Gran Anee (I forget which vintage,) a '74 Ridge Monte bello…merlot(!) a '70 and '75 Lynch Bages, and some old Chateau Gloria (which was popular in Reno at the time,) and a couple of older Bordeaux.
There was a really cool store in Reno called The Corkscrew, and the owner used to let me look with my girlfriend.
Haha, you beat me to it. It’s like the common consumer perception that wines costing less than they generally spend are crap and wines costing more than they generally spend are overpriced.
19 years old and started drinking wine, that’s impressive. I did not get into wine until my early 30s, got to make up for lost time. I hated alcohol until early 20s.
