Thanks for contributing. But the question was about drinking, not tasting. I am probably tasting ~1500 wines a year (this includes blending trials). That’s probably down from ~2000 - 2500. Judging obviously requires tasting far more wines than blending and buying, but blending and buying is still work and still requires a lot of tasting. Happily, I rarely find that a day of tasting and blending ruins my appetite for drinking wine with dinner, although there are certainly a few Beer Only evenings every year… especially in hot weather.
1 on a work night, but most always go to 2 or 3 on “weekends”. I usually like to see what the too early we opened red shows on the next day anyways when the weekend allows.
When both of us are home, bottles rarely get opened and not finished unless they are flawed or not showing well and could be showing better day 2. Usually, though, we open and finish 1 - 3 over the course of an evening or day, depending on day of the week. If I am home alone for a week, though, I often take that as a week to cut some calories and will stick to a glass with dinner. Those weeks I will have 3 - 4 bottles open to cover a variety of meal pairing options.
Most people in the business taste a lot of wine. When I was selling the stuff I tasted thousands each year, making an effort to taste as many as possible. You spit and don’t count those. After work, you go to the gym, go for a run, and open something good, or finish one or more of the bottles you’ve opened earlier. If you don’t keep tasting, you don’t know what’s in the market, what’s priced where, and how you’re holding up against the competition.
Amazingly, it doesn’t generally have that effect on me; I think because, while I taste a lot, I very rarely do the kind of long, centralized tastings that many journalists, by force of circumstances, are obliged to do. A big day for me is visiting five domaines in Burgundy, where I might taste 50 or so wines between 9 am and 6 pm. Which is quite different from sitting in an office in Paso and tasting 150+ reds, and much less exhausting.
But it does mean that my desire to drink young high-appellation red and white Burgundy is effectively zero, since I’m so often exposed to it—which is great for protecting the bottles aging in my cellar. After tasting a lot, I generally reach for an older wine at home. And if I want a young, refreshing wine I gravitate towards Champagne, Beaujolais, Savoie or Loire rather than the Côte d’Or.
We will typically open 1-2 bottles for a quiet night and a rough overage of 1.5-2 bottles per head for a dinner with friends. But being in the business clearly skews that number higher than it would otherwise be.
One, unless (infrequently) I have wines left over from a group dinner, or unless we finish off the remains of a bottle and move on to open another that evening.
We usually have a red and either a white or rose open on the weeekends. It took us four days to go through a rose and a red this past weekend. It is nice to have options.