great vintage available but bad year for you

A great vintage of your favorite wine is available but that was a bad year for you. Do you buy it?

  • Yes
  • No
  • I don’t know

0 voters

Assume there was a great vintage available for your favorite wine. However, during that year you experienced personal hardship/trauma that you would prefer to forget. The personal event can obviously differ for everyone but assume it is an event you would prefer not to remember.
Would you purchase that vintage? Or would you exclude it from your collection?

It’s a no brainer–skip it. No reason to add reminders of badness. there are always plenty of other good/great years out there.

+1
True, plus you can think of it as a way to save money for other wines on the list

  1. I avoided them for awhile but time heals and 01 d’Yquem is too good to pass on

If I like it: I buy/drink it.

If I did that, I couldn’t buy anything from 2016 thru 2020 vintages.

I have been buying wine for 55 years. There is ALWAYS another great wine/vintage to buy.

Interesting thread. I have bought many wines in great, good, and even middling vintages for sentimental reasons (birth years, anniversaries) but never avoided buying to avoid a reminder. Perhaps I am overly focused on the positive sentiment of the expression of grape harvested in such sentimental years and, for other years, simply focus on the wine rather than the negatives associated with the vintage (and there are a few). To my mind, the focus is the upside of a great wine regardless of year. And, that said, I am beginning to regret a few of those sentimental purchases that will bring interest – but not excitement – based on the vintage…

Interesting thought. It obviously never even occurred to me or I wouldn’t own so many 2001s and 2008s and I’d never touch 2028s when they come out :slight_smile:

Not superstitious at all. Never occurred to me. Otherwise I would have thought twice about a few vintages.

I’ve never even thought about it. A 2009 Pillot Chevalier Montrachet I opened recently was spectacular and I didn’t think twice about 2009 being a rough year.

Don’t know why anyone would care. One year is not all good…nor bad. A year on the vintage label is not going to haunt me and if it’s a good year, perhaps you can laugh about it.

Interesting perspective. I have never drawn a correllation, but then again, I really do try to avoid negative energy and thought. Every day we are walking or cyling around on this planet is a good day. Especially when we get to pop something good! :wink:

It doesn’t really matter to me, that is, the vintage relative to it’s “meaning.” But, I don’t partake in locating or thinking about birth year or anniversary wines.

Like many, I’ve gone out of my way to buy vintages with special meaning: wedding, birth years. I’ve never given a thought to passing on a vintage due to negative associations. Now that you bring it up, I suppose I’d look at a great wine from a personally difficult year as a reminder that good things also happened that year and enjoy it as a special treat for having got past the tough times. Glass half full…

I feel lucky that at this point I can’t think of a year bad enough to avoid buying wine from, but I can imagine there being reasons why someone might. if that was the case, there is too much good wine out there to get stuck on a single one

Life always has its ups and downs. When there is a down, life is telling you good times are up ahead soon. If my bad year has nothing to do with wine, buy it.

Never occurred to me

This question kind of surprised me because It really doesn’t occur to me to think about what I was doing in 2008 just because I’m drinking a 2008 wine. I guess I kind of get the birthyear/marriage year thing, but I just dont take the vintage date past what was happening in the vineyard that year.

+1. Don’t remember what I had for lunch, let alone what happened in, say, 2007.