I had planned to write a thread about restarting my cellar from scratch. I thought this would have been full of wisdom, insight and revelations.
It’s not.
Basically, I still like the same things. The main driver is accessibility. I’m in France, French wines are easier to source, my new cellar is more French focused.
I still spend the same money. It turns out Burgundy is almost as expensive. Champagne is a lot cheaper. I have access to older vintages so I spend more there.
The only difference is that I’m drinking more older wines instead of discovering new countries and regions.
Do you think France is the best place to find wines from other counries. It is getting better but has a long way to go?
I recently took a syrah from Gere, Hungary to a tasting and the sommeliers were incapbale of believing that such a syrah could be made outside of France.
Even within France the biases are marked. In the champagne region, in the north they do not really consider Aube as worth seeking out.
Yes. 100%. course people will chime in with exceptions and how different it is in Paris but overall I’ve found that this still holds. Mind you, it’s an observation not a critic. There’s nothing wrong with drinking local without subjecting the earth to the international transport of all these bottles. But I think it also talks to the “regionality” of France. People are proud of the locality they come from and are a little stuck to their local wines and foods. Although this also helps in preserving traditions and savoir-faire.
Whenever i have people coming over from Canada i ask them to bring bottles back from my cellar. I always choose different wines: Arcadian Pinots, Anselmo Mendes Alvarinho, Alheit Chenin, Badenhorst Cinsault, etc. And they always surprise my friends around here.
Obviously the internet has helped sourcing different wines in France but it’s still harder and costlier to acquire them.
I live 10 minutes from Switzerland and less than 2 hours from Italy. My local caviste who knows French wines inside and out carries 3 Swiss wines and 5 Italian…
Very easy inside the EU to buy from all the other member countries though and especially Germany is full of online shops with wines from all over and they deliver very cheaply to France. New world wines obviously a lot more difficult to find (esp. smaller producers). That said were I to live in France I probably would focus heavily on French wines (even more heavily than I do right now).
Yes, you’re right that it’s new world that cost more.
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and other EU wines i can get for same or better pricing from their respective countries. New world though always seem more costly than what I could get in Canada. Alheit Vineyards Cartology is the last I checked and was about 37 euros with shipping. I could get it for 31 in Canada. That’s 20% more.
It was about the same difference for Badenhorst and other SA wines I looked into.
But locally, outside of a small amount (I assume based on personal observations) of people that get them online, they’re not widely available. In Quebec, you had as much chance being served a non expensive SA Chenin or Tetramythos Roditis than les Jamelles Sauvignon by non wine obsessed people.
I feel like if I’d started my cellar from scratch it’d look a lot like what it’s shaping up to be now; fewer daily drinkers/weeknight wines, more age worthy bottles.
Same here. You don’t have to restart from scratch just to make changes. I identified last year that I had too many mid-range bottle that I never have occasion to drink and way too much low end WB that I never drink. Since then I’ve started the process of selling off what I’m not as interested in and shifting my purchases. Continuing that direction over the next year or two, I have no doubt my cellar will look very different than it did a year ago without having to “start over”.
I guess I might feel differently if I had bought a bunch of stuff I couldn’t sell. But most of the bottles I’m looking to offload are worth at least what I bought them for and in most cases 30-100% more, so it’s just a matter of all the manual labor digging through and pulling out bottles.
Out of curiosity, how much time was there between your old cellar and new cellar? I started my first collection in my early 20’s until my mid-30’s when I switched careers, had less disposable income for a bit and simultaneously got into beer and brewing. I didn’t collect anything for about 15+ years and started back up about 7 years ago. My new cellar is really different from my old one and I feel like I did learn some things that have helped guide the composition of my new cellar.
So curious how much of a break you had between your old and new cellars.
I think this might be a big part of the reason why it’s so much alike. I got interested in wine very young through my dad but only started cellaring bottles since 2014 when my wife was pregnant with our first. I decided to hold the bottles we would have had together and that just got wineberserkered into a serious cellar.
I think the reason is two-fold:
1 - As you pointed out, not a lot of time has elapsed since i started collecting, and;
2 - I still like a broad variety of wines.
What has most definitely changed is the average price per bottle. I’ll let you guess which way that went…
If I look at bottles I acquired early on, I’m still very much looking forward to drinking them even though they were not necessarily purchased for long term cellaring.
For me, my tastes narrowed somewhat in that 15+ years of not collecting, and to be fair, I think a lot of wines changed style, partly due to climate change, and were no longer styles I enjoyed as much (ie, too many big wines with high alcohol). So I’m buying from a smaller amount of regions but buying a little more widely from those areas. I think that’s partly (mostly?) an age thing for me though since when I was younger I felt compelled to try everything from everywhere, but now I just want to drink what I like.
But probably the two biggest changes for me this time are buying and cellaring more whites and buying more wines that have prime drinking windows that are 5 to 8 years out instead of 10 to 20+ years out. Previously my cellar was less than 5% whites and now I’m more like 25-30%. But I also have made a concerted effort to ensure I have some mid-term wines like Cru Beaujolais, Loire reds, intro level Willamette Valley pinot, etc that I can drink when they’re 5-8 years old and that I don’t mind opening mid-week. So now I try to keep about 10-15% of my cellar as wines that peak between 5-8 years that fill that need.
Glad I don’t have to start my cellar from scratch. Too many bottles that I have bought at reasonable prices over the years that no longer retail for reasonable prices (if you can find them at retail at all). Also, I like drinking aged wines. I have a bunch of them, but if I had to start my cellar from scratch now, what would I do for aged wines?
My plan was to not even buy a fridge and simply store whatever few bottles i would buy in a naturally cold and dark place… but that was a major fail. Without 6 months I already had boxes stacked up to the ceiling in the garage. With summer approaching, I decided to buy a 248 bottle fridge. The fridge is full. So it looks like i still find pleasure (or expected pleasure) in finding and cellaring wine.
Looks like the conclusion for now. Maybe (probably?) time will bring on change in preferences but it does look like even my earlier purchases still scratch an itch. So yeah, this is the Seinfeld of posts… a post about nothing.
Guess we take our biases with us wherever we go and it is difficult to shake them off. A cellar is merely one reflection of our personality and I suppose those biases exist there as well. I will say I wouldn’t have stocked so heavily in only the years I had money to spend on wine, but, they age nicely so who am I to complain?
Maybe it’s because I live in the US east coast which is the diametric opposite situation, but I think this is kind of awesome. Localism is highly endangered and under threat in our globalized world, and local traditions and pride are the source of much of what we love in wine.
Switzerland and Italy will have their own fiercely insular local cavistes and they will survive fine…
