If you’re talking 50 to 100 bottles of rather mediocre $30 wines, for a total of $1500 to $3000 wasted per year, then you’d be much happier in the long run if you were to purchase ten outstanding 1er Cru Burgundies at $300 each, or just one epic Barolo at $1500.
A lot of it depends on why you’re buying wine in the first place, and especially how you intend to consume the wine once purchased.
If you’re like us, and you just want to find the best $14.99 to $19.99 table wines in the market, then you’ve got to get to as many FREE tastings as possible, because purchasing wines blind, in order to sample them [and then discover that they simply don’t rock your boat], will bankrupt you, and will lead you to loathing & despising this accursed hobby.
On the other hand, if your wine consumption is social or business oriented, and you have the opportunity to host very large parties three or four times a year, then there’d be nothing wrong with having an extra 50 or 100 bottles lying around the house. For instance, if your business/social standing required you to throw big employee/customer/vendor parties every few months, with 25 or more attendees per soiree, then your extra wine would vanish pretty quickly.
But if you’re sipping all alone every evening, and if you’re not a billionaire, then it’s a complete waste of time & money to be stockpiling that extra booze.
For me it would come down to two choices: Either go low ball in search of the very best table wines, or leapfrog over the mediocrities and purchase a relative handful of the very best wines.
Out here in flyover country, there’s nothing worse than doling out $30 [which is real money for us], on the blind purchase of a wine, only to uncork it, taste it, and think to oneself, “Meh…”
And throwing $30 at 100 of those “Meh…” wines every year would be financial suicide [plus a colossal waste of time - moving wine into your house is HARD WORK].