“Sacrifice one of them in the name of knowledge, calibration, and future planning.”
I love this line! It is the only way to get your own ideas on when “peak” will be.
agreed. I don’t think the variety or buy more quantities is contradicting at all.
my breakdown is as below and I am very content with trying a variety and also my regular everyday wine list.
1-2 bottles - 20%
3-4 bottles - 27%
5-6 bottles - 20%
7-12 bottles - 19%
12+ - 14%
2 Likes
Big change for me was collecting before “life” having a wife and kids and a more time consuming job. Priority change is real and can greatly alter your events attended when 25-30 vs. 35-45, so you need to tweak what you consider a worthwhile event to open special bottles. Wednesday suddenly becomes an event on pizza night.
5 Likes
As others have astutely observed the problem can really be decomposed into: i) some bottles are too young to drink, ii) some are too fancy, iii) some are both
I’m relatively early in my wine journey - have been buying earnestly for 6-7 years - and have intentionally managed my cellar’s maturity curve for most of this time by backfilling, so ~20% of it is ready to drink now and the vast majority of it (roughly 90%) will have come online by 2032. Not come online as in be at peak, mind you, but entering what I consider to be an acceptable drinking window. Here is my curve (I have approx 850 bottles):
The other issue, which is imo much more consequential, is my willingness to open even quite fancy bottles at any time. I have little trouble opening them for wine dinners and romantic evenings with my spouse, but there are too few of such occasions and the bottles in this category are starting to stack up - almost half of mine are too fancy to open casually! - and I’d like this to be more like 20%
Per David Glasser I could always cut back on buying the fanciest but I am fascinated by the notion that they’ll be amazing in the fullness of time, to say nothing of the impossibility of sourcing them in the future. So instead of cutting back I am trying, as others have said, to push the boundaries of what I’ll open for a casual get together even though it goes against my Smaug-like tendency to hoard things. I have also started shifting my buying (in addition!) towards alternative grapes and natural wines to broaden my horizons and give me more options when I want to pull something to drink
4 Likes
A few thoughts.
-
As David said, do you really expect to have 1000 special occasions? Think about how many special occasions you are likely to really have?
-
When I was in my 20s, I was lucky that 1982 Bordeaux futures were being sold at dirt cheap prices. I bought classified Bordeaux to hold and then bought “lesser” 1982 Bordeaux to drink. Much of this was at the encouragement of my father who bought these wines (we went in together on some of these) because he wanted to buy wines he could drink while he still was alive. The names may have changed over the years (mostly because of price hikes for some of these), but what we bought (at the time for like $4-5 a bottle) were wines like Chasse Spleen, Potensac, Latour du Pin Figeac, Gloria, etc. Yes, some of them would have aged well, but they drank well young. Given the recent excellent vintages in Bordeaux like 2014, 2016, 2019 and 2020, should be a lot of good stuff out there.
-
Pick some of your favorite producers (or people you would like to be your favorite producers and buy their less expensive wines. For example
Hudelot-Noellat - buy the Bourgogne Rouge
Bernard Moreau - buy the Bourgogne Blanc
Mount Eden - try Domaine Eden or, in the case of Chardonnay, Mount Eden Wolff Vineyard
-
For as long as I have been buying wine (around 1980) or even drinking wine (around 1973), the best values in wine have been Kabinetts and Spatlesen from Germany. This has not changed. There are very few places on earth where you can buy wines from the best vineyards from the best estates at prices we are talking about here, but try JJ Prum Wehlener Sonnenuhr, Selbach Zeltinger Sonnenuhr, Reinhold Haart Piesporter Goldtropchen, Maximin Grunhauser Abtsberg or Herrenberg or Zilliken Rausch. You can drink these at virtually any age. Alternatively (or in addition), go next door to Alsace and try Trimbach Cuvee Fred or Albert Mann Schlossberg.
-
Drink some of your 1000 bottles. If you don’t drink them, how do you know which ones you like and which ones you don’t? You cannot go just by ratings. You have to find your own preferences. I bet you will like some of your special occasion wines more than others. And, some of them probably should be drunk younger rather than older. You don’t know what to buy more of until you drink some of what you have and see how much you like it. If you are new to this hobby, you need to pop corks to find out what YOU really like (and at what age YOU really like them). You don’t learn much staring at bottles. One suggestion I have heard of that makes sense. Buy a case of Bordeaux or California Cabernet or Burgundy or whatever (likely you have done the buying part). Drink one bottle from the case ever couple of years. Learn how your wines mature.
6 Likes
I do this too! I call it “death row” and have a couple racks in the cellar dedicated to a small assortment of bottles I want/need to drink relatively soon.
3 Likes
Howard and others. OP’s cellar is 140 bottles, not 1,000. In the OP, he quoted a different thread about a 1,000 bottle cellar with nothing to drink. This situation is more about storage than it is drinking special occasion wines.
Good advice though for others that have larger cellars with some maturity on them, or maybe not enough maturity yet.
3 Likes
Count me among those who misread. Even better though to get this advice at 140 bottles than at 1000.
Funny how “we” think of 140 bottles as a starter cellar. Tell any normal person you have that much wine and they think you’re nuts.
11 Likes
Tell a normal person nearly anything about what we do and they think we are nuts.
But I’m okay being nuts. It makes me happy, and I only get to live one time.
10 Likes
Cellar defender wines are really important as noted by others. We typically drink zinfandels 3-5 years from vintage date and will hold back bigger zins a few more years. I dip into my syrahs 6+ years from bottle date, merlot 6-10, cab franc 7-8 years and cab sauv I try to hold for 8-10 years from vintage date before opening.
I really just started collecting white wines the last few years and have chardonnay at the 4-5 year mark.
There are no hard and fast rules. There’s your personal preference for where to try and catch a wine you want to age long term. I would say most of us end up with larger cellars because we buy multiples of bottles to try and drink the bottles at different times of the aging process.
2 Likes
1 Like
Yep. Just this week I was talking with one of my coworkers who remarked a $15 or $20 bottle, that I would classify as a daily drinker, would be their “holiday gifting” bottle.
2 Likes
How was the 99 Icon? I have one tee’d up soon as well
3 Likes
Great with the burgers and opened nicely after an hour. The cork was a mess and literally fell apart even with an ahso. Have half bottle in fridge to finish tonight or tomorrow
1 Like
Seriously, for non-wine nerds like us $15-$20 is generous. Fancy. I’ve had many guests over who bring a $6 bottle or $8 bottle from the supermarket and it’s totally reasonable (from their perspective). I thank them, politely, tell them I have some other wine that I’ve planned to have that goes well with whatever food we have, and then put the bottle aside. And I feel good about it, because I think it’s sweet when guests show up at my host with any gift at all.
5 Likes
Thanks, if the issue is about storage, daily drinkers solve the issue. Wines to be drunk in the next year or so don’t need storage at 55 degrees.
1 Like
I remember when I had amassed 100 bottles, and I thought it was crazy (to affirm a point made a few posts ago). Now I do think of that as a “starter” cellar. Anyway, for the first several hundred bottles I drank very little due to advice from well-meaning friends. I finally started opening bottles and found a few things that made a huge difference to me.
- I need to open a bottle of something right away to determine if I like it. Waiting for “X years” because “Y said so” did not work for me. I had lots of wine that I just didn’t like once I started drinking it, and I discovered, that, for me, I’d rather drink a wine too young but get a sense of it than not understand how it evolves, whether or not I end up liking it more, less, or the same later on. Said another way, I needed to learn my own palate.
- While professional reviews are to me a reasonable starting point, it’s important to take them with a grain of salt until you do a lot of #1 (i.e., drinking and tasting) and discover your own palate. If I want to discover something new from behind my keyboard, finding a review from Jeb or Antonio can help me figure out if it’s going to be in my wheelhouse or if I need to be more open-minded.
- While I was in my “starter” stage I bought a few “special” wines and it was impossible for me to open them. However, over time I’ver realized that a special bottle MAKES a Tuesday night with leftover pizza special, rather than looking at the other way around. Once that clicked in my head, I stopped worrying.
- After 5-10 years of learning, I finally got to the point where I had a cellar full of “special” wines that I could grab whenever I want and I will always enjoy the bottle. And that’s how it’s been for probably 15 years
6 Likes
If you like Syrah then join the result of a crush club in walla walla. $25 a bottle and I could drink them any night of the week.
1 Like
Folks, please keep in mind, 140 bottles means he thinking almost a year in advance 
2 Likes
Or 4 months for some of us…
2 Likes