Given your life style, wine consumption habits and preferences what would be the ideal cellar size to provide an appropriate inventory of the wines you love. Assume for this poll that you are not constrained by storage space.
For me the joy of a cellar is being able to select the “perfect” wine for each evening meal whether it be chicken soup or filet mignon. Since I enjoy a fairly wide range of wines regions and varietals, and; have a strong preference for aged wines this requires a cellar of some size. For me I think the right sized cellar is about 2000 bottles. What about you?
400-500 is good for me. It gives me a chance to age some, but not be so committed to a style or region that I am stuck with a bunch of wines I no longer care for. Plus with retirement nearing, I don’t feel like I have the value of a nice automobile sitting in the basement.
Big enough to take from without care,
small enough to know your way around it without a spreadsheet,
and with enough variety to prevent the boring doms.
Yes I agree with this. Indeed it is quite intentional that my cellar space is constrained.
The ideal for me was the same as the OP, to be able to select a wine to match food and mood and to enjoy the fruits of cellaring wine.
In the early years where I tried to stick to 100, and then later to 200, I found I was drinking too many too young, and even buying from auction wasn’t defending the wines that really needed another decade or more. As what I’ve bought has matured, plus rediscovering wines to drink relatively young, and relaxing those early limits, there is a degree of balance now.
Ideal would be probably be massive, but realistically at ~ 120-140 bottles drunk a year, and let’s say an average of a decade in the cellar, maybe 1200 would be ideal in purely logistical terms. It’s never going to get that high though.
600 bottles down from thousands;the consolidation has left me with a concentration of my favs going back to the 1940’s through 2015’s. A few stellar bottles from 8-10 regions, mostly Europe and CA and a range of daily drinkers.
One wine cabinet and passive case storage for daily drinkers, very manageable.
I have more wines now than I’ve ever had, but my cellar is not getting any larger. This is a short term problem.
Over the last 3-4 years I have picked up the pace in buying age-worthy wines from regions I love because the time is coming – in fact to a large degree is already here – where new vintages are of no use to me no matter how good or attractively priced they are. When I retire, I want a well-stocked cellar of wines that will age gracefully, just as I do, until we fall apart together.
Ian, I agree with your 10 times your annual consumption algorithm. In addition, I have just recently started to carefully compare what I drink to what I have been buying (CT really helps in this regard). It has really opened my eyes to some imbalances in my cellar. For example I need to cut back on Syrah purchases and increase Pinot purchases.
I am doing exactly what you are doing re age-worthy wines. I am retired and I have struggled with the question of whether to stop buying wine since I have plenty to get me to a ripe old age. I have chosen to slow buying a lot but I would like to maintain my cellar for the foreseeable future. I just enjoy the the availability of a broad selection of aged wine.
