POLL: drinking habits for married people (or those in relationships)

[Brian_Tuite]

So, mine is a hybrid. Wife not in to wine, me whatever floats my boat. However… when I am opening something higher end, my wife seems to summon a glass magically in to her hand.

Then she is in to wine lol, and merely because she can tell given the difference in my cadence with a daily drinker vs something deserving some care.

You ain’t gonna serve her no crap wine! I like her style.

[Fred_Bower]

Wife generally calorie-conscious on alcohol consumption, but I met her when she was working in a wine shop, so she understands when I pass the glass over to her it is for a good reason. Case in point was F.X. Pichler 2016 Kellerberg Gruner Smaragd Monday night. That bottle carried into Tuesday night too. There are “special” wines that will need an event, with the right folks in attendance (perhaps), but the cellar was built and stocked to supply the table. Period.

fred

[Kirk.Grant]

Curious on people drinking habits relative to their significant other, and to an extent their wine friends. Personally I have found myself only drinking the good stuff with wine friends and on special occasions. I rarely pop a $60+ bottle on a weeknight if I want to have wine with dinner/food. Most of the time, I will only drink the high-end stuff on special life occasions (birthdays, anniversaries, job promotions, etc.) or if I am with friends who are really into wine. There is no right or wrong answers here, just curious on other people’s wine habits.

My wife drinks one glass of Matua Sauvignon Blanc most nights after work, rarely more than a second glass. I drink wine irregularly. Last Saturday as a family dinner, and then maybe a week before that. While her go-to is about $11/bottle. I will open whatever I’m in the mood for, whenever I want it. However, there are some wines…that really do demand to be shared with others.

[Mattstolz]

it looks like a lot of us are in the boat of a SO that also likes wine but not to the nerdy extent a berserker does. my wife knows when she likes a wine, can name most of the grapes for most big regions, but is still kinda surprised when her somm friend tells her how well we drink. however, I think she secretly knows that more than she lets on. smart as a whip, that one.

[Craig_G]

Wife enjoys wine, has a good palate, but could not begin to tell you which vintages were good, what producers are known for what, etc. She just enjoys and appreciates good wine and can tell the difference between good and wow, and plonk and good. We open just about whatever floats my boat. Only occasionally will she request something specific. More likely she’ll tell me what she’s not really interested in that night, and I’ll work around it. If I know she’s out and I’m interested, I’ll drink a chardonnay because it’s among her least favorites. I’m less likely to pop what I consider an expensive bottle on a weekday than a Fri or Sat, but that also depends on what’s going on and what I’m cooking.

This is about where we are. She generally doesn’t care “what it is” which I care very much about. I’d spend a lot less on wine if I didn’t! But her palate is very good and she does appreciate really good wines.

There are a number of places where she differs from me. She doesn’t generally like aged whites, and she almost never likes fortified wines. She’s also less accepting of old reds that are not at their best, even birth year wines.

Champagne is always good.

[Matthew_King]

Totally flawed and obtuse poll. But no hard feelings.

My wife drinks, maybe, 3 units of alcohol per month. With girlfriends.

Was that an option?

[Paul_McCourt]

My wife is more “interested” in wine than “into” wine. She enjoys semi-geeking out now and then, has attended a few classes, will listen to my wine blathering and enjoys drinking good wine.

That said, some of that is undoubtedly because she generally loves to participate in what makes me happy, but otherwise will happily drink a riesling or pinot of any ilk and be perfectly content without giving it much thought.

I have no idea where that fits in the poll

[Markus_S]

I don’t see where price enters into this. Say you have a cellar of wines bought for $40 that are now $300. Is that a “special bottle” now or is it something mainstream in price because that is what you paid for it?

And where is the option for “my wife will drink a sip if a glass is handed to her telling her to ‘try this’”?

[Markus_S]

…I think she secretly knows that more than she lets on. smart as a whip, that one.

And that is why you married her!

[Fred_Bower]

I went back and read the clarification of categories and think I should have selected 4, but voted 6 based upon my interpretation of the poll. Once we get past the price at which proper viticulture and winemaking can be sustained (which isn’t much per bottle), then price and quality correlation ceases to be consistent. I don’t need to have $150 wine every night and don’t feel like I need to reserve the $150 bottles for extremely special occasions. I consider a lot of the sub-$30 wines I drink to be “very good” and am often buying at the top of their price bracket. Raul Perez Albarino is an example…it’s a really expensive Albarino, a really good wine, and about $30-$40 depending upon which one we are talking about, which is why I answered 6. At the top end of the price spectrum, I absolutely do reserve those bottles to share as a staged experience with people that will appreciate it as much as I do (even if it fails to deliver to the heightened expectations). DRC is the poster child here. There aren’t too many of those types of wines in my cellar.

[Markus_S]

Part of the poll is to also see how one’s S.O. affects one’s willingness to open a relatively expensive bottle on their own.

I don’t see how that matters, particularly because it’s a sunk cost, i.e., you’ve already spent the money.

[J_Galang]

Part of the poll is to also see how one’s S.O. affects one’s willingness to open a relatively expensive bottle on their own.

I don’t see how that matters, particularly because it’s a sunk cost, i.e., you’ve already spent the money.

Personally for me it matters, just isn’t as fun opening a really nice bottle and enjoying it solo. Nothing wrong with people being able to do this, or my preference for that matter. I just personally find it a lot more fun drinking the nicer stuff with people who are more into it and am perfectly happy opening ~$20 bottles most of the time when I drink by myself for dinner. I do belong to 2 local wine groups who meet regularly and also have a friend who I see often who is also into wine, I open most of my nicer bottles during these times. Of course I also open them for my wife during special occasions, which is one of the few occasions when she drinks. She is just not really into drinking alcohol at all.

[GregT]

My wife likes wine and has a great palate, but probably couldn’t name 2 dozen wines by name. I get a lot of “I like this one; you can buy more” or “we’ve had this one before haven’t we?”

That’s about the size of it here too. She remembers flavors, doesn’t remember the names of the wines or grapes or regions. But she definitely remembers that two years ago she didn’t like the same wine that’s in her glass right now.

Since we both like wine and we have it every day, we just open whatever we open. And if she’s out of town and I want a particular bottle, I open it.

It’s nice to drink with friends, but why let friends limit your options? Especially when they’re not even in the house.

[S_Rash]

My wife has a similar palate to mine, but her nose is far superior. We mainly drink Rhone varietals with some Zinfandel thrown in. Usually open what sounds good on that day. We do have a smaller 18 bottle wine fridge where she can open up anything in it without asking for permission.

[Chris_R2]

Thanks for the poll. This is an interesting subject for me as well. We amassed a small collection (~10 cases) and had to move it from one coast to the other right after kid #1 was born. We stayed mostly even, drinking between 3-4 bottles / week until kid #2 came along. That corresponded with also coming off some waiting lists, and our mutual desire to cut back on consumption.

Needless to say, we’re now sitting on a top heavy cellar and wife isn’t a fan of opening a $75+ bottle on a Tuesday. I kinda wonder how others manage their cellars. Do you plan out what you’re going to open when and how fancy you go? Do you let the wine gods move you to a bottle? We don’t have a ton of space, so my collecting goals are pretty focused and I have an upper limit on the number of bottles we can realistically keep—a limit that I’m fast approaching.

[Brian_G_r_a_f_s_t_r_o_m]

… Part of the poll is to also see how one’s S.O. affects one’s willingness to open a relatively expensive bottle on their own.
…

I never open one of our “nicer” or “relatively expensive” bottles just for myself, unless it’s a Sherry or Madeira (because my SO doesn’t like those, and I do).

[Frank_Murray_III]

My wife doesn’t drink red wine, and hasn’t for the near 25 years we have been together. But, she drinks white but more importantly, she drinks Champagne, which is much of what I drink these days. She’s good for a glass from a bottle over 3 days, leaving the rest to me. And she has developed a more attuned palate over the recent years, able to spot dosage, acidity and other markers in good Champagne. But, she is fine with something that is $40 as much as she is something at $125. She will never pick a wine from the cellar either, leaving the choice to me, the pairing, etc.

I’m damn lucky.

[Dav3_Dyr0ff]

Our decision to open a bottle of the “good stuff” vs a daily drinker is strictly one of finances and inventory management - We can only afford (or only choose to spend the money on) X bottles of the good stuff per year, so we can only open X bottles of it per year (on average anyway) and maintain cellar “equilibrium.” (There is also a cellar space element here as cellar capacity influences how many we can open per year if we want to maintain a given average maturity level in our cellar). If we open more than X every year, we’ll end up drinking them younger and younger as we go along until we run out, and we don’t want to do either of those things.

Since that is what drives it, we would open exactly the same number of “good” bottles per year if she were as into wine as I am as we do now (unless we increased the wine budget which we might if she hypothetically dropped her other hobbies in favor of geeking out on wine, but that’s not going to happen). Certainly, though, if the wine budget were large enough, we’d buy only the “good stuff” and drink it every night. But it’s not.

Within that, we’ll open the good stuff whenever we want in theory, but we also know that we don’t want to open daily drinkers for special occasions and I’m not going to bring a daily drinker to an offline, and we like to bump it up a notch on weekends, so we prefer to save enough of the “good stuff” to cover those occasions. And it just seems to work out given our cellar and budget right now, that we have/buy enough of the good stuff to open one (or more for larger events like when the kids visit or we’re hosting a wine dinner) pretty much every weekend, every special occasion, and every offline, as long as we don’t open any on regular weeknights, so that’s what we tend to do. But if I had a real hankering for one tonight, I’d open it and then skip it this Saturday. I just tend not to choose that path.

I also have a sense of which of the “good” bottles are more up my wife’s alley (Italian, for example) and which aren’t, and I tend to avoid opening the former except with her and when she’ll have some. This is why I’ll rarely bring an Italian red to an offline (unless she’s attending, which is even more rare), even though they make up a sizeable minority of the cellar.

As stated in my earlier post in this thread, I’ve also bumped up the number of “good stuff” bottles I’ve bought in just the last couple of years as income has grown and college (and pre-college) kid expenses have started to wane. These extra bottles are all younger than I prefer to drink them, but will allow us in retirement (or at least the first 10-15 years of retirement) to open the “good stuff” a bit more often, when the concept of “weekend” will hopefully have vanished from our brains anyway.

So that’s when we open the good stuff - as often as we can afford to given our budget and our cellar capacity and our desire to drink those bottles when mature. The rest is easy, since we (I) like to have wine with dinner every night - any night I don’t open a “good” bottle, I open a daily drinker.