Darn, just drank my last bottle about Thanksgiving 
Just kidding. The OP asks about âbuying/collectingâ. In those days I started buying, not collecting. I didnât know that much about wine at the time, knew that the Magdelaine tasted good and drank it all within a year, maybe six months. Then went back to drinking to drinking Plavac for $1/btl, less 10% for full case purchases.
Dan Kravitz
This sounds a little like me. I got bitten by the bug way before i started cellaring.
My dad got me in the game early on but i couldnât afford bottles when I was younger and there was no cellaring culture in Quebec. So i was drinking my âfunâ wines when abroad or when offered.
2015, my wife got pregnant and I started to cellar the bottles she couldnât drink. Man, did that veer into unhealthy wine hoarding quickly!!
Hereâs my story. Was on a date in 1981 and when offered the wine list from a waiter I looked at it without a clue where to start. He helped me but not without acting like a condescending asshole.
Within a week I went to the mall and purchased Hugh Johnsonâs book promising never to be in such a position again. I read voraciously anything I could get my hands on. Subscribe d to The newspaper like Wine Spectator and within a few months managed to put together a small cellar under my basement steps with about 50 bottles. By late 1982 I was purchasing my first wine cellar, a Eurocave that held 250 bottles from the showroom in NYC for $1025. I still have the receipt & even remember the gentlemanâs name, Greg Granderson. I was 21.
So in essence, all condescending assholes working in restaurants and wine shops are just doing their best in trying to get clueless people interested in wine. Great news!
I got a job doing warehouse work at Zachys right after college in 1987. In my mind it was temporary while I did other things, but cooking was already a pretty serious hobby, so I got into wine pretty heavily almost right away. Within the first two weeks it was clear that if I really wanted to drink great, mature wines, I needed to buy them when they were young and affordable and then cellar them. I read everything I could get my hands on (Parker, Wine Spectator, Michael Broadbent, Schoonmaker Encyclopedia, etc) since there was no internet then. I start out buying a single bottle a week to stash, and while I was mostly buying singles to cellar, I did pick up a lot of classified Bordeaux, some Rhones, and some California reds. I left Zachys in 1992 and went to Park Avenue in Manhattan when Geoffrey Troy was still working there and got the Burgundy bug. I moved to Oregon in 1993 with the intention of learning to make pinot noir, but didnât really have any connections in the wine trade and ended up doing other things. I ran out of wine money when I was switching careers in the late 90âs and got way into beer and homebrewing. Got back into collecting in 2016. Drank the last bottle from my Zachys period in 2016: 1986 Lynch Bages which was remarkable (and proof that 1986 Bordeaux would come around if you gave them 30 years). Cellar 2.0 is different from Cellar 1.0, and Iâm happier overall with the make up of Cellar 2.0.
But the whole process made me realize that collecting wine and drinking wine are two different hobbies. Collecting to me is still 100% about investing in my drinking future as opposed to trying to flip wines, but collecting does make you alter how you buy wines.
Probably true, but there are ways to behave even with young know-nothing wine buyers. The immediate ramification was the zero tip I gave.
Although my interest in wine started in my late 20âs, I did not start collecting until my early 30âs. That is when we bought our first house and had a basement for storage. When we moved from San Carlos to Danville we bought a cabinet, and then another one 10 years later.
I would drink the occasional wine with the wife when were out to dinner but never really collected anything. 4 kids came along so that didnt help things. Eventually my career evolved to a job where I had a nice expense account and was entertaining clients on a regular basis and a number of them were really into wine so I learned a lot from them. Then, visits to Sonoma and Napa along with France and Spain so now my collection is growing. Not sure I would consider myself a âcollectorâ but getting upwards of 200 bottles now.
Your math skills are pretty good Marcus. My first trip through the Valley was in â88 or â89, canât quite recall exactly. The restaurant was Benjaminâs at the Pacwest Center. It might be a bit generous to call it upscale, but at the time, it was pretty nice. In a short time my buddy became a bartender there, so I used to hang out there quite a bit.
I may have gotten my NW geography wrong too, itâs been a long time! Liner and Elsen used to be just a block or two north of Burnside, but now Iâm thinking it wasnât on 21st. My apartment was on 20th and Flanders, so from there it was toward Fred Meyer.
Beyond the age when I started seriously collecting (27), the biggest factor in my descent into inventory madness was lucking into being invited to join a tasting group in 1998. The group had been founded in 1974. This meant numerous opportunities to taste older wines blind, including Bordeaux (firsts, and top right bank wines including Petrus) and top end California (e.g., Heitz) from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as other things that I would never had the chance to taste without that lucky break. The group is still around, with three original members still active or semi-active.
I started to drink halfway decent wine while in college at Princeton. New Jersey is almost 100% BYO. My girlfriend (now wife) and I would go out to dinner and pick up a not terrible bottle of wine, often from Princeton Corkscrew (which was and probably still is a great shop).
The first wine I bought to actually lay down was at some point in law school, when I was about 24yo (probably circa '06/07). I remember I bought a mixed case of 3x '04 Giacosa Falletto, 3x '05 Bouchard Corton, 3x '05 Faiveley Cazetiers, and 3x '04 Palmer. I still have almost all of it, except the Palmer which has been consumed (and was delicious!).
On our honeymoon in 2007, we visited Burgundy and stayed in Beaune. We also stayed overnight at Troisgros, where we drank 93 Rousseau Chambertin for 200 Euro. That was a big factor in sending me down the rabbit hole.
Late bloomer here. After a life of teetotalling, I started at exactly age 40 as a birthday gift to myself with a trip to the Niagara wine region here in Ontario, Canada with a purchase of 6 bottles of different icewine and the false claim to myself that it was all the wine I would ever need or acquire. Here we are now 600 bottles of wine and 50 bottles of liquor later and Iâm both a wine and cocktail aficionado.
Around 28. I got Jon Bonneâs New California Wine book for my birthday that started interested in CA wines at first, plus I started to have enough disposable income to not just drink beerâŠ
Your geography is spot on. The original L&E was on 21st right near Everett. Great shop.
I donât remember Benjaminâs but in 1988 Pietroâs Pizza was my idea of dining out and Hamburger Maryâs was a âniceâ restaurant.
I started working downtown Austin in '99/'00, a couple years out of college, and started frequenting the Austin Wine Merchant shortly after. Iâd been drinking wine for a few years at that point, but it was pretty random supermarket stuff. The shop itself was somewhat Burgundy-focused, and those were the days when stuff like Mugnier and Dujac would sit on the shelves. My first big purchase was when the '01s hit, including several cases of Roumier⊠still have a handful of those in storage.
Curious to know how many others have the collecting gene in general or if itâs specific to wine. I was a pretty serious vinyl collector until my wine habit took over.
It would be interesting to correlate the age at which people started buying wine seriously and their birth year/current age. Iâd guess that a high proportion of us that started in our 20s are well over 50 now.
In the mid-80s, for instance, you could buy second growth Bordeaux for under $30 a bottle. A lot of Burgundy was still pretty affordable for young professionals in the 90s. In 2000, you could buy most top Barolos (excepting a handful of producers like Giacosa and G. Conterno) for $40-$50.
Another generational factor is the popularity of cocktails and craft beer in the last couple decades. Wine wasnât necessarily the alcohol of first choice for many younger people.
âWine collecting is defined as the interactive confluence of Obsessive-Compulsive, Hoarding, and Affluenza disorders.â â Victor Hong
I think youâre spot on John.
Beer in the 80s was pretty mehâŠand in Oregon the Liquor Control Commission wasnât focused on bringing in anything but the most basic spirits.
Currently craft beer and cocktails are a million times more interesting than they were in the 80s. No real exaggeration there. My family had English friends and we would go to a pub called Produce Row so the Brits could drink Bass (which was considered great beer at the time) and they were basically disdainful of American beer.
I started collecting in the 90s, and could by Ecard Savigny les Beaune Serpentieres for $20, Dujac for $40-50, CdP for $25-30, and Piedmont for $25-40. There was/is a great Italian place in SE Portland called Ginoâs, they had a killer wine list that had Barbaresco and Barolo going back 15-20 years and very little of it over $100, a lot at $50-70.
There were unobtainable wines, like Krug RosĂ© or CdM, but there were not whole swathes of wines and regions that werenât affordable and wine in general wasnât a luxury hobby.
Sadly youâre right about the age!
I used to feel sorry for anyone young trying to build a cellar today, because of the high prices, but then I realised I was wrong. Firstly, quality has risen. There are second or third tier Bordeaux which are better today than Montrose 82 was for example, even if they cost more (and taking into account inflation, Iâm not even sure). Burgundy Iâm not so sure about because it has never been my sort of thing, but what is clear is that someone today has no need to focus on these regions, nor Barolo - there is so much going on elsewhere.
I suppose that today I would just buy differently - rather like @LasseK or @Otto_Forsberg do. I think itâs a great time to be building a cellar, not least because a resource like WB wasnât even on the horizon when I started out. I had nobody do discuss anything relating to wine with! The mistakes I made as a resultâŠ
About the age factor or the collecting disorder? 