Yeah, I have a friend who’s been collecting and cellaring since the early '60s who still buys wine that for his tastes would take 30-40 years to be ready to open. He may buy fewer such wines, but he won’t give up on his favorites. Another friend that age with a similar cellar has stopped buying and is fine with that.
Blame Parker and other wine critics. 
My solution has been to start buying smaller quantities of more expensive wines. Since most of us here do not have an unlimited wine budget, the volume is more easily constrained by the budget. You still get to indulge in all the obsessive aspects of the hobby (except, by design, the Annual Alfert Bacchanal of 12 cases arriving at once!) and you get to drink better wine.
Todd - you may need more friends and hold more parties. That is a really good way to make room for new wine!
LOL, who ever said “Annual”?!?
The shipping window is November through April here, gotta keep those yummies rolling!
Kidding aside, buying AFWE wine in Florida is, well, you can’t. It’s largely a wasteland, so about 75% of my purchases are from out of state. I guess my purchases could go down with all the shipping regulations being enforced now. I think my last shipments snuck in under the wire, only one needed to be re-routed. The shipping season is fun. I buy wine over the year with some select retailers and they hold it until the weather clears. I end up with lots of cases, and its like Xmas, so many things that I completely forgot that I bought. This last shipment was a mix of some select mature wines, many 2014 Chinons and 2015 Rhones, and then a healthy dose of daily drinkers. It’s amazing how many high quality wines are available in the marketplace for $30 and under. Helps keep overall price down, too!
Back to those mature wines, it still never ceases to amaze me that one can find mature Bordeaux often for less than current release prices. And some of those are before Rolland got his hands on them! ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
Asks the creator of a wine website… 
I recall when Todd and Uncle Bob were quite close.
See, this i don’t understand. One buys a wine to drink, but continually buying-selling-buying-selling seems to preclude that, unless you are always drinking early-drinkers. I can see selling wine that has appreciated beyond a certain ‘silly price’, say a 300% jump in something, but selling for the sake of selling…why? Make friends and give it away - they’ll be happy and you’ll be happy.
Its taken you this long to realize you may have a problem. I am just shocked you are only at 400 bottles, for shame.
Might want to change that to can you drink. As we age, metabolisms change, there are prescription drugs that can interfere with wine/alcohol, and your body might have more of a say than your mind in what you want to do.
Umm, my wife would beg to differ with you.
+1
A couple of years ago I took a hard look at the wine that had piled up in storage. I tried to think about whether I was actually enthusiastic about drinking that bottle or not. There were a lot of “yes” votes, but there were also a lot of bottles that I realized that I was ‘attached’ to simply because I had collected them and didn’t want to let them go more than I actually wanted to drink them.
So I ended up dumping a couple of hundred bottles. I’ll admit I felt weirdly sad, but at the end of the day, I am glad I did and I don’t miss them.
I took some of the money and bought (completely guilt-free, btw) myself a beautiful new kayak.
Of course, some of the money was plowed right back into other bottles of wine, but I never said I wasn’t a sick, sick man.
Homeowner policies will sometimes treat buildings on the property but separate from the main house differently.
I couldn’t agree more with this… I love wine so there is some utility to my collection but if I wasn’t collecting (and researching and discovering and hunting down… etc.) wine it would be something else. Seeing all the pretty bottles lined up in racks has its own value to me.
I understand those who see a bottle that needs to be held for a decade or more as a significant added cost but to me it means I get to enjoy owning it for 10 years before I get to enjoy it in a different way when I open it.
I bought almost every single bottle with the intention of drinking it. (The sole exception was Screaming Eagle, where it was sell one and drink two.) My problem was that the thrill of the hunt and the joy of acquisition resulted in a larger inventory than I could drink before the wines started deteriorating.
I failed to reign in my hunting/acquisitional urges and wound up in the same position 2 more times. Not proud of it, no humble brag. I only made significant money on one of the sales, when prices got silly for first growths. The others were barely break even after costs. It was a failure on my part.
The other issue is that we’re drinking a lot less. About a bottle a week, some weeks no wine, rarely 2 bottles a week. So we’ve gone in the less quantity, more quality direction. I’ve done the math and we’re set for the next 12 years, which will take me well into my 70s. I like aged Bordeaux and have reached the age where it makes no sense to buy young stuff any more. There are 2 cases of 2016 futures on order, and that will be it.
If I live into my 80s I’m guessing my palate will shift to more fruit forward wines which won’t need aging.
You can never have too much wine, if you like the wines in your cellar and if you have friends.
I’ve tried to quantify when I hit “too much wine.” Cellartracker says we drink ~70 bottles of barolo each year. Ideally, I’d like to consume barolo 20 years post-vintage. So that’s a 16 year conveyor belt of vintages to build up with 70 bottles / vintage. That would account for 1,000 bottles in a cellar.
Barolo is the extreme example. Most California wine I’d like to drink 5 years post-vintage. So we might drink as much California as barolo each year but the conveyor belt of vintages is only 4 vintages deep.
By this logic, our California buying should be at a replacement level only (the conveyor belt is already 4 vintages deep) but I should still be buying more Barolo than we drink each year because the conveyor belt won’t be fully operational until 2021.
I agree with Merrill. I also look at the accumulation of bottles as the funding of my retirement drinking plan. In the end, if I don’t get to them, my kids will.
There you go bringing CellarTracker into it and trying to apply science to this art.
I’m in the same situation, and am trying to gently downsize my cellar. I started tracking number of bottles at the beginning of 2017 and decided to go from around 650 to 600. Making a concerted effort to do so this last year has left me holding steady at 650. At least it isn’t going up any more.
As I age I’m drinking less. Also, since we only drink riesling with dinner (and even that not as frequently) all the reds I own are only opened at various wine dinners.
Since I bought all my wines with the intention of drinking them, and remember when/where I bought pretty much every one and in some cases have looked forward to drinking them for 20 years I’m not inclined to sell but it may come to that some day.
I’ve gone from “I need to save that for a special occasion” to “I need to find some excuse, however flimsy, to open that”.