Living in fear of Drinking Windows

Does anyone else overthink prime drinking windows and shut down periods into account when choosing a bottle to open?

I started cellaring wine about 3 years ago, mostly buying new release California wines from lists and allocations. I usually buy just 2-3 bottles of a particular wine so that I can try a variety of styles - I’ve never bought a case of anything. I’ve started to broaden my experience outside of CA, but the majority of my cellar is still young California reds with a good chunk of Rhones and Nebbiolo.

I’ve found that I don’t really enjoy most “bigger” reds right at release, preferring to wait a few years for the wine to smooth out and integrate. Ideally, I’d wait 7-10 years or buy older vintages at retail/auction, but I can get impatient and this often leads me to open wines between 3-6 years after release.

Sometimes I open a bottle in that timeframe and I get what I’m after - integration and complexity, with the fruit still at the forefront but with other elements coming out to play and the tannins a bit more tame. Other times I can’t help but wonder if the wine isn’t showing it’s best because it’s currently in a “dumb” phase.

I find myself checking CT notes from Others on my Wines daily, just to gauge when I should be drinking from my cellar.

Does anyone else do this?? I just hate looking at a cellar of 200+ wines and feeling like I don’t have anything to drink!

What has been working for me is breaking down how often I drink, when, and what I want to open. I use that to back into what I need and go from there.

My advice:
(1) Don’t overthink it.
(2) Exercise patience now that you’ve found some wines you prefer with some age.

Picking the ideal drinking time is not a science. The same wine can show differently on different days of the same week. Food, company, mood and, probably, air pressure and stuff like that affects the overall pleasure you get out of a bottle. Not to mention decanting, which can be good or bad.

All you can do is sample your wines from time to time and see how they’re doing and make a gut call on when you’ll open the next one. (Keeping notes definitely helps.) Over time you’ll get a sense of what works best for you, but that won’t be that reliable even when you have more experience. Aging wine is inherently a gamble.

I wouldn’t pay too much attention to CT unless you know the palate of the individual, and know something about your own preferences for that type of wine (older, younger). Also, some people will decant while others won’t, which can make a big difference, and people typically don’t say if they drank the wine with food.

Now, impatience – that’s a problem you just have to work on if you really do find that you consistently like your wines older! Back-filling with older vintages might help.

Well…gotta agree w/ John on this one, Eric…don’t overthink it…it’s not science (or Science as we refer to it at LosAlamos).

It always puzzles me when people refer to a wine in a “dumb” or “shut-down” phase. Although I haven’t drunk all that much wine, I have yet to have a wine that I could
say with 100% (or even 60%) certainty that it was “dumb” or "shut down. To do that w/ any degree of confidence, I would have to be drinking that same wine on a yearly or semi-annual
basis. I just don’t drink that way. True…I’ve had wines w/ a few yrs of age that don’t deliver the impact that I would have expected. But maybe it’s just not evolving the
way in which I expected. But “dumb” or “shut down”?? Could be…I’m clueless. Sometimes w/ a few more yrs, they evolve into something pretty special. I guess that then I
can assert, ex-post-facto, that the wine was “dumb”. But recognizing “dumb” at the moment it happens…that only happens when I look in the mirror whilst shaving. At least for me.

So John’s right…don’t overthink it. You pays your money and take your chances.
Tom

Stop buying CA wine and you won’t have to worry about it.

Ha! If I bought Burgundy I’d be a mess!

I agree 98.3% (scientifically calculated). I think you can have an informed opinion that a wine is shut down if you know its performance in prior vintages, or if know how other wines of that type have performed. But it’s still a surmise. The proof or disproof is in the bottle … years down the road.

The problem with ‘sampling’ wines is that many of us may have only one or two of a specific bottling, so we can’t sample : (

Yup, Julian…that is, indeed, the problem.
I have little doubt that some wines will go “dumb” in a period of their life. But you have to be a winemaker, tasting
those wines on a daily or weekly basis, to catch it.
Tom

If you save tasting notes, I heartily recommend picking at least one wine to buy a whole case of and open one every other year and watch your notes over time.

That can give you a decent idea of your palate, how you perceive aging, and maybe give you a bit of a hint about similar wines you are buying/cellaring.

That’s not too pricey for the time release joy you will get and will be a good companion on your wine journey.

I’m in a similar spot. Have bought 1-3btl of hundreds of wines now and routinely scratch my head for something to drink. Either it’s not a big enough occasion for something precious or the mid-range stuff isn’t ready to drink, etc. it’s paralyzing, for a first world problem, and leads me back to soda water on many occasions, for which my liver, typically Promethean in its agony, resolutely thanks me.

I have enough wine that i’ve finally decided to open better bottles on a day to day basis, and also decided that it’s okay to open drinkable bottles before their time. I’m also buying more of fewer, so able to engage in the game of trying them every so often to see how they age.

If I had a bottle of wine for every time I looked in there thinking “I have nothing I can drink now”…I’d have a lot more wine!

I’ve been buying and collecting wines since 1990 and still walk into the cellar and think that none of it is ready to open. When in reality, I probably have quite a few that are long over the hill. It’s a strange paradox.

My tastes run to 20-30 year old Bordeaux and I buy on release to cellar. I had a lot more “opened that too soon” disappointments than “waited too long” experiences as I learned what I liked. It’s becoming less of a problem as my wines and I age. So far, I haven’t been opening many OTH bottles.

The ideal time to drink a wine is clearly once you’re dead.

I definitely treat them as ‘advisory’ even though I tend to put my own window in for each wine.

It is good to follow recent TNs for wines you have. My CT homepage displays these and I think that’s the default setting. It can be a useful memory jogger to remind you that you have a particular wine and it is becoming / is now mature.

I do ~ every month or so, decide I want something properly mature (aka over-mature for many palates) so do tend to use the standard reports ‘ready to drink’ or ‘drink up’ IIRC to narrow the list of potential victims.

As for looking at the cellar and saying ‘there’s nothing to drink’, I think many of us have been there. Ok it’s no crime to open the odd bottle early, but a real shame if everything we drink feels like it needed another 5-10+ years. If this is starting to frustrate you, then buy a case or two of mature wines either from a specialist merchant, or via auction (or indeed from someone selling their overspend on this site). If you go through them quickly, then re-stock with another case. Doing so will defend your cellar against early drinking.

regards
Ian

I’ve finally come around to trusting that, as long as the wine was delicious when I drank it, I drank it at the right time. Might it have been even better at another time? Sure, that’s possible. Or it could have been worse. It’s one of the joys of having a case of the same wine, as others have said here and as I have said many times - being able to observe it’s development over time.

It’s a bit like selling and buying stocks. If you try and buy at the lowest point and sell at the highest, you’ll drive yourself insane and probably miss a bunch of opportunities awaiting that magical perfect moment.

+1.

I’ve finally come around to trusting that, as long as the wine was delicious when I drank it, I drank it at the right time.

This, plus what John and Tom said.

There is no science to when you prefer drinking. Nor is anyone else’s opinion worth too much unless you like wines at the same point in their lives. If you’ve only been interested in wine for three years, you have a lot of tasting to do. Moreover, why keep buying from wine lists if you aren’t drinking the stuff? That makes zero sense to me if you’re buying based on the recommendations and opinions of others. I hope you’re buying wines that you have tasted and liked. If not, open a few. And remember - it’s always better to drink a wine on the way up than on the way down.

To clarify, I’m in no way claiming I’ve moved above the need to wonder and worry about it, only that I don’t punish myself if I open something that’s still clearly not at or beyond peak. I appreciate those experiences for what they are, too. To the OP’s question, yes I absolutely look at notes on CT and here to put those impressions in the mix. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re relying on it completely.

I really do think that too few people go in for case purchases in their first few years of cellaring wine. It totally get the desire for variety, wanting to taste broadly, having limited funds etc. All of those things make case purchases tough. But I have found tracing a wine’s evolution over time to be possibly the single most interesting, exciting, and valuable contributor to my wine knowledge and appreciation over the last 20 years. If you have the space, I can’t recommend strongly enough buying a case (6 if you can’t swing 12) of at least 1 or 2 wines each year. It’s been enormously educational and pleasurable to me, and I wish someone had urged me to start doing it sooner.