Maybe a dumb question, but I was thinking about this and wondering how other people approach these situations. I recently found a local importer of small French producers and bought a mixed case to try some of his producers as there are not many tasting notes available for some of them.
One of the first bottles I tried was an absolutely delicious 1er Cru Gevry-Chambertin. The importer has about half a dozen vintages available of this wine. Assuming you can only afford 1 case at this time, do you:
A) Load up on the vintage you tasted and loved?
B) Purchase a sprinkling of vintages you know are great vintages?
C) Purchase a 2 x vertical of each vintage available? (No notoriously “bad” vintages to avoid from the available selection)
About a year ago I started to think for the first time about purchasing wines for long-term storage, while managing relatively tight space constraints and a budget that will not allow high-volume purchasing at any one time. If money is tight I wouldn’t recommend buying more than one bottle of any wine you haven’t already tried (or at least had previous vintages of), whether or not they are from great vintages or great producers, simply because tastes vary between people and in any given individual over time. I’d recommend getting 3 bottles of wines you really like and 6 bottles of wines that you love and want to follow over time. That will allow you to have diversity and explore new things while also having enough of the wines you enjoy to revisit them multiple times.
On assumption that importer will continue to have the other vintages available, I’d order whatever number you want of the one you liked, and 1 bottle of each of the others. Then try those over coming weeks/months, and order more of any you also like.
Having recently built my own cellar, I have been often disappointed by wines I have not tried before buying. Even from those whose palates I have learned to trust, I find that I still learn with every busted bottle how to interpret their vocabulary. I would also note that Burgundy vintages taste really different from each other, e.g. I find 2013 to be very lean/acidic – I would not buy a vertical if you did were not required to… I would buy the vintages that demonstrate characteristics you appreciate more than others (some love 2013 and describe it differently than me… “classical” they say!"… I like 2015 while some others do not “roasted” they say!). If you want to educate yourself on how different vintages can taste different, that would a different/fun exercise.
I bought 2 bottles each of 2013 through 2018 and then I started thinking about it and started this thread.
I think I should have bought 4 to 6 of the 2014 (the one I tasted and loved) and then a few others from various years after doing more research. But I don’t have enough experience to know if I like some years better than others, and most of the better Burgundy bottles that I have bought I haven’t even tried yet as it bothers me to pop something that everybody thinks needs 5 to 10 more years at a minimum.
I personally would never buy just 1 bottle of anything affordable that I’m truly interested in trying and have reason to believe I might like. To me that’s like trying to decide if I want to buy a painting based on seeing a piece of it through a peephole. I might end up not buying the painting, but I want to see it in its entirety and from all angles before I decide.
If it’s truly a flyer, something I don’t know at all, quite expensive, or if I have reason to believe I might NOT like it, then perhaps I might buy a singleton. It doesn’t happen to me much anymore, though I certainly bought mixed cases of singles when I was first starting out. Now, it’s not very interesting to me from either an intellectual or hedonistic perspective. Unlike some others, I don’t very often find I’m stuck with wine I don’t like. I might like other wines better, but that’s okay - if you only bought your very favorite, you’d have a pretty dull cellar.