What is the meaning of your wine hobby?

I am doing research for my new articles and will highly appreciate for your self reflection on the subject.

Can you please elaborate on what do you see as the purpose of your wine hobby/passion?

I see wine as a mixture of art and geography in a consumable manner, making it both hedonistic and intellectual. As a hobby that makes it very complete.

I can say it has been a lot of money that could have been spent elsewhere on healthier, more productive things, but there is that mixing of food-geography-and pleasure that Tomas has pointed out.

Ever evolving it has been different things at different times. It’s a memory of a special event, history of time and place, science but with a touch of art. It is a puzzle of tastes and smells. It reports on the weather of the vintage and sometimes more (fires, hurricanes, and squirrels to name three). It’s friendship and sometimes sorrow.

Every bottle is an experience.

Drinking something really tasty from places near and far. [cheers.gif]

Use of the word “purpose” seems inapposite to what wine appreciation is. I will concede some folks engage in it with an endgame in mind - amassing collections, auctions, sales, etc. Mine grew far more organically, started with family and evolved with friends, with wine being part of what brought us all together in pure enjoyment. The more I experimented, the more I embraced both the intellectual and artistic side of the passion, learning as I went. It has been all about the journey with no endgame at all. It is a passion based purely on pleasure. And it has introduced me to a world of friends, many of whom have become life-long friends.

Wine collecting is defined as the interactive confluence of Obsessive-Compulsive, Hoarding, and Affluenza disorders.

OCHAD!

To make the world a better place

To promote civil, and uncivil, discourse. Wine helps with the latter.

Stamps: hobby
Coins: hobby
Wine: lifestyle

I use wine for joy and as I do so I deplete it. If I used my 1930 Zeppelin stamps and spent my 1885 Silver dollars there’d be no joy and it would all seem so… senseless.
Luckily there are many outlets to replenish my wine and I must say, that act of the hunt itself does bring joy. So maybe I have no clue and will shut up now.
Lol

Nicely phrased Mike…joy is a perfect descriptor. And joy is best shared with those you love. Wine for me scratches so many itches…intellectually and esthetically. And it even harkens back to the shared communal experience of rolling and sharing a joint–an act of fellowship/community/worship. And finally to quote one of my favorite movies…“it tastes so fucking good.”

I was very geeky about wine for many years. It helped me build a cellar full of wines that I like/love. I’m now in the enjoyment phase. I don’t obsess about it. I just enjoy pulling out good to great bottles to enjoy with my wife, and sometime in the future again, friends and family.

It is traveling to a different time and place, usually a much more beautiful one, without leaving your armchair.

Lately it is also escaping all the idiotic “news.”

Right now? Absolute insanity. We’re all just trying to catch that perfect bottle(s) and the evolution of the wine while we store it and wait for a drinking window.

When we aren’t dealing with COVID-19, its about traveling to the regions and tasting the variations of grapes, the styles and pairing with great food.

Sharing with friends and family is the pinnacle of drinking wine.

A number of things for me:

  • an activity where I will always be able to learn or experience something new
  • a way to connect socially with other like minded people
  • cellaring wine for the future builds anticipation and something to be excited about
  • provides an excuse to travel to certain places (that I would travel anyway, however, can create a lovely trip when combined with historical and cultural tourism)

Besides tasting amazing, the main appeal for me is the sense of connection that wine gives. Wine connects me to the place where it was made, and with the people who made it. It is a way of experiencing different cultures and traveling to different places without having to leave my house. Not to mention the great people that I’ve met through mutual interest and the pleasure of sharing great wine together.

Several things for me as well, some reiterated from above:

  • Lets me socialize with others who share a common passion and thirst (no pun intended) for knowledge
  • Allows me to better connect to the history and culture of the regions whose wines I buy
  • To train myself to objectively evaluate a wine for quality and in the art of delayed gratification
  • To leave some sort of legacy to future children (if we have any), should we be so fortunate to share the same hobby

Mu