Yeah, I don’t sit around and say this is experience No. 4 all time….but it’s pretty easy to look back and go through the wines I have as my best experiences. What stands out consistently then is bottle age. More so than producer, region, or bottle age, though all of those play a part as not every wine becomes great with time.
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There’s also the reality that those wines just aren’t always the best wines. Unless you don’t drink anything else…
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“Tens of thousands of wines”. Let’s get real here. No you haven’t.
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Yes, I could definitely do that. There was a hypothetical Reddit question about it, actually. The gist of it was that if you could have unlimited quantities of 10 different wines but the total price per bottle of the 10 wines combined would have to be less than €1000, and I picked only Rousseau CSJ.
Sounds good, clearly you know more about what I’ve drank than I do 
I’d argue many of us would feel different about it. Give me 2009 Latour every day and I would eventually get bored of it.
Best wines for what?
Your math just ain’t mathing.
You rarely drink, yet you’ve had 2+ wines every single day for the past 20 years?
I love a good hyperbole, but come on now.
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I think the hypothetical was that presumably the wines would update with vintage so that they were all drinkable, but I would imagine that’s true.
I didn’t always not drink at my current rate of consumption, it’s probably been just a couple years or so.
I also spent a lot of my early time in drinking attending many large events with hundreds of wines being poured (and still do), as well as going to tastings at stores with 10-20 wines being poured. When I lived in LA there was at least one of these types of events every day and in NYC many every day. When I first started I tried to taste everything from every genre of wine, not so much anymore.
At La Paulee for example just at the tastings there’s a few hundred wines being poured, not to mention the other dinners. I’ll probably taste 3-400 wines this week. I’ve gone for a decade. I used to go to the PNV, HdR, the Zinfandel event, etc.
Terrific conversation. I find a lot of what @Mike_Peterson wrote in the OP to resonate with me.
I don’t drink “shitty” wines and don’t waste my time on good-very good wines if I’m doing the choosing. But I’m not drinking killer/outstanding bottles every day either. Most of the bottles I open are in the excellent or excellent to outstanding range. Definitively outstanding bottles happen a few times a month.
I do find that a truly outstanding bottle gives more pleasure if it’s been a while, like a couple of weeks or more, since my last one. Not that the third or fourth outstanding bottle in a week, when that happens, tastes any less great, but it doesn’t give as much pleasure, not as much of that “dopamine boost“ as the first.
I’m not surprised that my experience is similar to some, different from others. As much as we all share a love of wine, I’m sure we all get different things from it - just read the discussions about the desirability of imaginary non-alcoholic wines that taste just like the real thing.
Wow…I love the above message. I wish I could add more…
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I just apply math to all this, that’s all. 400 wines this week? So let’s say you are working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, and you are tasting a wine roughly every 10 minutes, non stop, this entire time?
I’m not sure if your math really works here.
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Have you ever been to a mass tasting or trade event? There are booths with 4-6 bottles per table. You go through them, then go to the next booth. There are dozens of booths. It’s certainly not the same thing as sitting with the wines at a dinner, but you can taste a lot of wine in a very short time.
Yes…I more I read MChang,s posts, the more I agree with yur above comments, No offence is intended to MChang.
That being said, I love to read MChangs TNs …and I will continue to do so… .
Yes I have. With the long lines and general whaffing around, you won’t drink 100 in a day, not even close.
Uh ok. Not sure which ones you’ve been to but I’ve tasted every wine at La Paulee every year I’ve been there, including the salon which is the hardest to get.
What a fantastic thread, Mike — and what a great way to frame what many of us have been experiencing but couldn’t articulate. The “sensory calibration trap” is real, and you’ve named it better than anyone has.
A couple of things worth noting: @CFu has touched on elements of this, and I actually started a thread back in 2023 (Enjoying some wine much more, a lot of wine much less...what to do?) that orbited a related problem — though mine was more about being stuck drinking from ‘the quantity’ when what I actually wanted was to chase the stuff I was most excited about. More tactical than philosophical. Mike’s framing is more interesting and I think gets at the root cause of why that happens.
Since that 2023 thread I’ve shifted pretty dramatically. I’m in full “choose the rarity, choose the one most likely to give you pleasure” mode now, which feels like a direct response to Mike’s sensory calibration concept whether I knew it at the time or not.
Here’s a wrinkle I’ve added that I’d love Mike (or anyone) to give a name to: I’ve become an empty nester, and Jen has largely lost her enthusiasm for wine (the kids, when they’re home, MORE than make up for it — they love drinking with dad!!). So I’m almost always drinking alone now, which means I pull a bottle, enjoy it with a meal, and immediately decant the other half into a 375ml and refrigerate it. The thing is… I almost never enjoy that second half as much. Sometimes dramatically less so. The Gonon Les Iles Feray example in my original post above is a perfect illustration — first night with a flatiron steak, it was glorious. Two days later, opened the 375, and it was… fine. A fraction of the first experience.
Is that Mike’s sensory calibration trap in a micro format? The “scarcity” reset happened overnight? I genuinely don’t know, but it feels related. I’d love a proper name for it.
Also — and maybe this connects — wine is just less enjoyable alone. So maybe some of my “half bottle is disappointing” experience is about context and social pleasure, not the wine at all. I much prefer enjoying wine with others, which, I presume, is part of what has made this and many other wine communities and tasting grouops successful for decades/centuries.
Anyway — fantastic topic, Mike. Let’s keep it there. 
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At the risk of drifting the thread further, it is possible if that’s your goal - there will be ~150 wines at the Grand Tasting on Saturday and it lasts 180 minutes, giving you 1.2 minutes per wine. I’ve definitely gone through a producer’s table in under 2 minutes before (~30s per wine), although you don’t get the most nuanced sense of the wines!
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I find that most (red) wines usually taste notably worse on following days, except for a few producers (e.g., Goodfellow). On the other hand, I’ve always considered wine a fundamentally social beverage rather than just something to drink, so maybe it makes sense that it’s less enjoyable alone.
Yeah I’ll usually taste through everything and come back to the ones I am interested in later on, it doesn’t take that long to taste through everything.