How do you select an 'obscure' wine from your cellar?

WINE TALK
41

All of the above, plus one additional strategy.

I keep a section of my cellar that is up front and at eye level as a “physical” ready-to-drink section. A few times a year I do a deep dive into CT and identify a case or two of ready bottles across regions and styles and rotate it into this section. When I need a bottle and don’t feel like pulling up CT, or if I want to send th wife or a friend in to pick, this is where I point them.

Sometimes it’s just more satisfying to be able to have that retail, tactile browse & grab experience. A little prep goes a long way.

42

i just look arround the cellar and see what jumps out at me. I am trying to drink my older wines instead of saving them for a “special ocassion”

43

this sounds about right

44

That’s my issue. Selecting a wine involves scrolling up and down the tracker saying “nope, need to age more”, “nope, too nice”, “want to keep that one for a better meal”. Then looking at inexpensive wines thinking “well, I have so much that’s better than that”

45

+1

With a couple exceptions, such as, staying in theme for dinners or events, pairing up with friends, thinking about what might be interesting to a newbie…

46

Well that’s a snotty reply.

I have 27 varietals in my cellar, so no, I don’t memorize them all, and stay on top of each of them, particularly as they come and go with consumption and purchase. I don’t find myself ever thinking ‘I think I’m in the mood for Aglianico’, as I have maybe 2 bottles of it, hence the origin of the thread. ‘Obscure’ (to me, in terms of frequency of ownership and number of bottles owned) varietals in my cellar have a tendency to be overlooked - I don’t think of them when going to the cellar to pick a wine - so the focus of my inquiry was to find out how others might remember these low-probability bottles.

47

Well if I do look, I look at varieties. :wink:

48

Todd, it really helps if you don’t buy obscure wine… [snort.gif]

I keep about 160-180 reds, about 50 dry and off-dry whites, and the smattering of bubbly and dessert wines at home, with the offsite holding some 800 or so. Among my saved searches on CT are: “Reds at Home” “Dry Whites at Home” and “What’s at home by type” so I usually start there. For blancs and bubblies, I have a 30 bottle beverage cooler that keeps those ready to drink at about 47F, so I always keep a stock in that bullpen that’s ready to grab.

49

How do you do that? I just took a quick look in search options and you can only pick one location to narrow down a search. Unless all your bottles at home are listed under one location.

50

Try this: starting with My Cellar, summarize by location, click on your desired location (for me, home location is simply “cellar”), then summarize by type and click on “red” or whatever, then I summarized by variety and saved that page as a saved search.

51

Way too accurate [smileyvault-ban.gif]

52

We keep a wide range at home so no 1 variety dominates the selection process. We start with what we are making for dinner and go from there. We drink 60% white 30% red and about 10% pink. In the 60% white bucket is a pretty diverse mix from Italy, France, Germany, Austria etc so it’s easy to pick up something more “obscure” compared to the most popular white varieties.

Last night we had a lovely Kerner from Alto Adige with take out Chinese food. It was a nice pairing.

53

Really? I can’t imagine wine folk not thinking like this. I do this all the time. I say…I’m in the mood for an Alto-Piedmont wine tonight, something with a touch more vespolina than just a nebbiolo-based wine, or, I want a gamay with that. It’s how I think.

54

Ok, that’s what I thought you probably did. I have 4 locations that amount to “home” and it doesn’t appear to be a way to select multiple locations for a custom search.

55

The “Top 4”, as you say, represent a combined total of 7% of my cellar. So, for me, I’d say my obscure choice would be one of those wines/varieties; it’s all relative.

56

For me, my cellar has finally aged to the point where I have some wines I should be drinking now. I usually pick a dozen or so bottles from that group and try to get a variety of wines in that mix. Dinner time is then picking from that selection on most nights. I do admit to being geeky enough to change what we make to match the wines when I get down to the last few bottles in that dozen. Once the stand up bottles are gone, I start with another batch.

57

I start with a specific ambition. Then get tired of digging for it and simply give up and grab something in front of me that catches my attention.

This.

58

I don’t find myself ever thinking ‘I think I’m in the mood for Aglianico’, as I have maybe 2 bottles of it, hence the origin of the thread. ‘Obscure’ (to me, in terms of frequency of ownership and number of bottles owned). . .

Opposite here. Those are most often exactly the ones I’m thinking of when it comes to being in the mood for something. If I have bought something from a region I don’t know, or if it’s a collection of grapes I don’t know, or if it’s something I know but in a different context, like Zweigelt from British Columbia, I tend to remember it because I’m anxious to try it.

The main reason I ended up with a lot of wine is because every time I got home with something that was “obscure” to me, I wanted it right away and I’d pass by other stuff I was already familiar with.

I’m more likely to forget about things that are not unusual for me in any way. For instance, I found more Dunn that I didn’t remember having. A happy find, but oddly less exciting than finding some Armenian gem.

It’s somehow easier to remember the outliers. I know I have a bottle of Regent that’s way too old and it is in storage quite a ways off, and I have some English sparkling wine that I wanted to age just to see what happened, and some English mead that I never intended to age but the guy I bought it for never picked it up so now it’s got ten years on it, and I have a bottle of 1997 Rosemount Shiraz that I wanted to stick into a blind tasting of N. Rhone Syrah at 20 years just to see people’s reactions.

59

Usually, it happens when Carrie says she needs wine to cook with. I go get a wine we don’t normally drink and open it. Carrie grabs the bottle and takes a swig. From there, one of three things happen:

  1. This will work to cook with
  2. This won’t work and it gets poured out
  3. This is good, let’s drink it. Go find another one to cook with.
60

You taste wine and reject it for cooking?