43% is Champagne. By bottle count, '08 DP is #1, but on a volume basis, '06 Comtes is #1 because I have more large formats of that.
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Wow you must have a lot of magnums.
I probably have nearly 60:1 ratio of bottles to magnums in my cellar.
Champagne is 21.7% of my private holdings.
12% of my champagne is large format, 27% of that is Comtes. '02 and '06 Comtes magnums were priced at pretty close to 2x the 750 price, so I went really deep on them.
We’re only at about 7 percent despite Champagne being 12 percent of our consumption, and having started tracking our consumption during a period when we still assumed that Champagne was only for special occasions.
I think I would be happy to bring Champagne up to between 15 to 20 percent of our cellar over the next 5 years or so.
25.3%, though likely to rise to close to 30% based on buying trends.
“Sparkling” is 26.8%
That actually makes sense in the likely case that you don’t hold bottles of Champagne on average nearly as long as most wines in your cellar. Both because they already arrive with more age than most wines and most people prefer them closer to release age than after holding for a long time in your cellar.
Current cellar composition has little relation to actual consumption rates. If you drank 20% rose, you could have a cellar which is 1% rose. And if you drank 5% Barolo, you could have a cellar that is 20% Barolo.
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I suspect that more WB Champagne collectors/drinkers drink them young, but there are more than a few of us who like them with age. I like both, but most of my purchases are for Champagnes that age, which is why I prefer to buy in quantity.
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Sure, but even if you prefer more age, a lot of Champagne comes out of the gate with it. The current release of Dom is 2013 and the current release of Cristal is 2015. And it’s not just the tete de cuvees, regular Taittinger vintage brut is only 2015 on shelves now.
But you can buy 2020 Barolo and Bordeaux off the shelf already, wines people would age for decades.
Obviously everyone is different in the wines they select and how long they hold them. My broader point was just that cellar composition has only a very loose connection to consumption rates, both because (1) it is heavily affected by the average length of time you hold wines after purchase (e.g. see my rose example, you could drink a ton of it while having hardly any in your cellar), and (2) cellar composition reflects buying preferences and choices going back a long way.
Sometimes, the stuff taking up a lot of space in your cellar is the stuff you don’t drink much of, and you don’t have much of the stuff you’re most into now because you keep drinking it.
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In my opinion and I think the opinion of others who collect these wines in quantity, the wines you mention are nowhere near ready to drink and won’t be for another decade.
If you bought five bottles of 2015 Cristal and five bottles of 2020 Barolo of a similar price when they were first released, how long would each group spend in your cellar before you opened them?
I’m not trying to argue against aging Champagne or whether you or anyone else does it, but you see my point, right? It’s just that cellar composition is a lot different than consumption.
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I suspect that I’m not alone in working consistently over time to align cellar composition with consumption. I mentioned in one of these current Champagne threads that my goal is to have in my cellar at least 5x annual Champagne consumption to achieve this alignment.
13 dom is pretty good right now, but one of the reasons we cellar champagne in quantity is to drink them over the course of their evolution to see how they develop.
I’m drinking 2004 and earlier maison Champagnes and roughly the same in Barolo/Barbaresco. I drink growers earlier, often much earlier, as I do Langhe Rosso.
0.004%
Some of us are beyond help.
Of course it is worthwhile to check in to see how they are evolving. I usually will drink a bottle or two of the grand marques from my own cellar early, then hold until they approach their prime window. My friends mostly drink their Champagnes younger, so I have plenty of other opportunities while we wait on mine. 2004 Krug and Cristal, which you don’t like, were both very acidic for their first 20 years of life, and are finally hitting stride. Drank and '04 Cristal a month or so ago and it was delicious. Same with Krug at year end.
Looking at the consumption question, per CT, I have the following champagne consumption rates (as a % of total logged consumption). Though with the caveat I did not strip out consumption other than drinking:
2023 - 40.6% of wine consumed was champagne
2024 YTD - 34% of wine consumed was champagne
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Wow, that’s a pretty good amount of large format.
I’m probably more 2-3%. I have the most Krug 164 magnums, then a smattering of others, other than Krug 164 and 08 Comtes no more than 6 of each. 06 Comtes I have a few but they’re very annoying to store.
I seem unable to surmount a forest for the trees hurdle here, but I’ll just say one last time for the record that I have nothing against aging Champagne nor do I question that some of us do it, but in a broad and general sense it is still true that Champagne (or any wine category) percentage in your cellar has only a loose connection to the person’s consumption and current interest level between types of wines.
One of my wines of the year last year was a 1996 Dom which I had lovingly owned since release. Still would have been excellent for another decade or more, or so it seemed. But my consumption percentage of Champagne is far higher than its percentage as a composition of my cellar.