What's your average cellaring time for wine you have at home?

WINE TALK
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Cellar Tour (not mine) This video got me thinking about my own wine storage and how I’m a 3 or less bottle buyer of a single wine. One to consume now, one to try in a few years, and one to tuck away for a rainy day (maybe 5+ years).

When you buy wine do you have a timeline when you think you’re going to drink it? I find a lot of the entry level nv Champagnes drink (to me) much nicer on average after a year. I really enjoyed seeing how diverse Whitman’s cellar is because it really shows how adventurous of a wine drinker he is. How much of your cellar is dedicated to truly aging wines vs storing wines?

A lot of customers I’ve bumped into over the years have said they don’t like storing wines at home because they don’t have the patience. :joy:

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I don’t have any way of truly tracking the average cellar time for our wine. If I had to guess, I’d say most of our wine sits with us for at least 5-10 years or more from vintage. I can certainly say that, with the exception of regular rotation drinkers like rose and most langhe nebbiolo, everything we buy goes behind what’s already there - older wine in the front, younger wine buried behind.

We have mostly historically bought in quantities of 6 or 12, so they come in boxes and the boxes go into the case storage area. Rack space is at a premium, and is comprised mostly of the expensive stuff, or current drinking vintages. There is pretty much nothing in the cellar, other than most rose and lambrusco, that I don’t think benefits from a few years at the very least. While we might sample a bottle from time to time within a few months after arrival, often we don’t even touch the first one for 1-3 years, and most serious wine not before 5 years out or more. There are exceptions, of course, but mostly what we love about the wines we cellar is what they become after time. Even when they are delicious young, the characteristics for which we seek them out don’t appear until some years have passed. We’ll usually open the first one a touch earlier than we think is ideal, to allow us to see more of the development, but more often than not we end up burying the remaining bottles.

We have no issue keeping our hands off new arrivals, as there is plenty to drink, some of which arrived a few years ago, but is still new to us. Of course it takes a certain amount of time and volume before you can have a rotation like this.

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Inventory is the cure for impatience.

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This is the biggest issue i am currently facing.

Being a relatively new collector, most of my inventory is 19-20-21-22, Burgundy/Bordeaux mostly.

I dont want to open these bottles any time soon, at least not the more prolific ones.

My solution so far has revolved to buying back vintages here and there for special occasions/dinner parties where the participants are into wine. If its a weekday I will try to resist the urge to open anything above 80 USD unless we are having friends over as stated above.

To combat this urge you need to have some easy drinkers which are

  1. Cheaper than the rest of your collection
  2. Not bottles you want to store for a long time.

For me this is Langhe Nebbiolo, some Villa Antinori Chianti Classico and lower level burgundies.
This is the only way that I personally can see my cellar evolve. If not i would be killing off babies left right and center!

As a new buyer its a process that i need to feel comfortable with if i want to experience mature wines from my own collection. as @Dav3_Dyr0ff said. Inventory is the cure for impatience. In my case; cheaper more accessible inventory…

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Very much agree. I would stress something I am sure you already know - cheaper and more accessible doesnt mean less enjoyable or full of pleasure or deeply satisfying. Sometimes a wine that asks nothing of you, and gives its all, is exactly what you want, especially if you tend to drink regularly, say with dinners at home. My cellar is at the point where I could drink nothing but relatively expensive bottles, but I don’t want to. Those are often not what fits best with the mood, food, attention span and moment. Now, if you drink only on rare occasions, perhaps you only want special occasion bottles, for lack of a better term. It’s all highly personal.

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I think every new wine lover that starts to build a collection goes through this.

If you’re into Bordeaux, or many new world wines, there is a huge amount of back vintage wine available, often at prices lower than current releases. Bordeaux is especially easy to find, and in volume. While I got sucked into the 2019 vintage frenzy, my general plan is just to buy what is ready now (for me that’s 1989, 1990, 1996, a few other vintages).

Sadly that isn’t possible for every region. Burgundy is really hard to find at reasonable prices and volume more than 5-10 vintages back. So I tend to buy new vintages to store and back vintages to drink when I can find them.

The good news is that eventually your cellar will transform into readiness. After about 11 years of collecting I’m starting to find this balance. This hobby teaches you patience!

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This is how I buy too. I don’t have a huge capacity to store bottles and I don’t want to pay for an offsite. To me, there’s too much great stuff out there to tie up 6 or 12 slots in a single wine.

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Yes this exactly.

This is a lovely question for a post, and as everyone above pointed out the issue is solved or defined by what your spending limit is and or your generosity, and what the quantity of your purchases are.

Not having access to my cellar right now besides twice a year, and then finally when I’m “home” not wanting to drink anything I can find on shelves most places, leaves me with quite a big inventory and I see now big chunks of my cellar aging more than what’s appropriate.

I’m already shifting my purchasing patterns to higher-end stuff with enough bottles from when I started filling up, to keep me entertained for a while and to not go beyond capacity. I’d be happy to revisit this thread in ten years though to see how off I was!

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I’ve not looked up the stats, but the act of cellaring wine has been a constant element within the wider hobby for me. I get a degree of pleasure in making that commitment i.e. the patience required is a positive for me.

A quick mess around in Excel for what is in the cellar (excluding NV wines), gives average age from vintage at around 13 years, with average time since purchase at roughly half of that (6.5 years). Slightly inaccurate, as it’s 20 years since I started logging this info, but the error will be negligible as it looks like less than a dozen were bought earlier than that.

With plenty of long-term agers in the cellar, I’ve seen a shift towards more modest wines over recent years, mostly to get a spread of different wine styles, and that itself was another key ambition from the outset - to have choice available when deciding what to drink. Some of those more modest wines are still solid performers in the cellar, but maybe with potential more like a decade than 2-4+ decades. My earlier years were probably too focused on long cellaring wines, but once I discovered auctions (and a friend whose business was buying/selling older wines), I got a better balance by buying in some maturity.

Do I have a timeline? Yes, I always tend to record an ‘advisory’ drinking window, but have learnt not to be precious about it, as it really is a very inexact science to opening a bottle at ‘the right time’, with the setting (food/company) typically being more important than any perceived precision on being ‘just right’ in its maturity. For those like the OP and myself who rarely buy in case quantities (and even half case is pretty rare), it’s impractical to seek precision.

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Since I didn’t start buying current releases until the 2017/2018 vintages, I’m currently drinking a lot of 17/18/19. 3 years ago I was also doing the same, lol. So 3 years ago my average cellaring time was, say, 1 year and now it’s 3 or 4.

So I imagine it will continue to increase up to a point. I do like primary notes in my lower end daily drinkers. So I don’t imagine I’m going to be popping a bunch of 2020 village wines in 2040 even if I had them. I think 7-10 years is close to the sweet spot for me on lower end stuff.

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Once you expand your horizons beyond “wine spectator wines”, there are literally thousands of wines out there to choose from, a large number of which are very enjoyable young, particularly white wines. We drink probably 80% white, and often bottles that are 0-5 years old. And we drink well :slightly_smiling_face:

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I have a pretty clear idea of when I’m going to drink something when I buy it.

About 50% of my collection consists of Bordeaux and Rioja, which I buy at 3-7 years old when I can find them for good prices, and then hold until they are about 12-20 (my preferred drinking window for most of these wines). So there’s a lot of them in the house but they are a relatively small fraction of our drinking

About 20% of my collection consists of California Syrah and Sauternes, both of which have no secondary market and so I can buy ready-to-drink, mature wines as needed on WineBid. These therefore tend to have a short residence time in my house - up to 2 years, with a small amount of Syrah that I buy young to age.

Between these two is Zinfandel and old vine field blends, about 10%. I tend to prefer these with a few years of bottle age on them, but some I will hold on to for a decade or more.

About 5% of my collection consists of mostly aromatic whites, which represent about 50% of our drinking because we absolutely tear through them. My spouse’s preferred wines, too. This is mostly young Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Albarino, a bit of Gruner and Gewurz, etc. These wines last no more than a few months in the house and it’s hard to keep them in stock.

The remaining 15% is a mixed bag of everything else, which is hard to generalize about.

My spouse and I also have about a dozen daily drinkers at a time sitting on a bar cart, separate from the “cellar” (wine fridge), which are free-for-all bottles. Our rule is that they have to cost less than $30 and cannot be bought with the intention of aging.

The part that is hardest for me to incorporate into all of this is the wine I get from work or from other industry friends, which tends to accumulate faster than I’d like and gets in the way of my system!

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Since I have been buying and collecting for about 40 years, my numbers differ. For reds, I have historically bought larger quantities upon release of great wine in exceptional vintages while mostly bypassing lesser vintages. Some of my more recent examples are 00 &05 Bdx, 00 & 08 Barolo; 06 &16 BdM, 08 &12 Oregon PN. Lots of late 90 and early 00 (01) Stickies.Those wines are still my go to for special dinners including off lines. All are drinking nicely, with my 08 Oregon PN right now being at a particularly great spot.

I rarely touch a BdM at less than 10 years old, but I’m still enjoying many from the late 90s (97,99) and 00s while my 16s mature. A recent 95 Biondi Santi El Greppo was brilliant. I bought that wine at the winery in 01 for $115. Today’s release prices are significantly different! :flushed:Same with Barolo. Of course at my advanced age, I’m now mostly buying younger wines for earlier consumption, while enjoying my bountiful cellar. That’s what it’s all about! :wine_glass:

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My cellar is 80% Zinfandel and 15% petite sirah and 5% odds and ends. Most of my wine is Bedrock or Carlisle. Carlisle has been publishing drinking windows for years and years. Bedrock has been publishing drinking windows for the last couple of years, but when they released their drinking windows they did so going back to their very first vintage. So I now have drinking windows for nearly all of my wine.
I am not saying that the drinking windows published by those two wineries are infallible, but I suspect that they are relatively accurate.
And, to be realistic, what alternative do I have?
So I follow those drinking windows. To be specific, I generally order two bottles of each Zinfandel and petite sirah that they produce, and I try to drink them about three years before the window closes. This practice has not disappointed me.
With only two bottles of each wine, I cannot realistically open a bottle every year to see how it is aging. I trust Carlisle and Bedrock, and so my drinking plan is pre-established for me, more or less. I make lots of exceptions when the need arises, but generally this plan works well for me. No effort on my part, which is a plus.

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Based on purchase dates; 10% of the cellar has been there for more than 20 years, 55% is more than 10 years and 75% is more than 5 years.

This does not speak to vintage / average age: 5% of the cellar has more than 30 years of bottle age, 25% is more than 20 years old and 80% is more than 10 years. The average (mean) vintage is 2008.

I have been collecting wine since the late 1980s and generally prefer wine with lots of bottle age

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This is a contradiction. There is no secondary market so you buy them ready to drink?

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I mean that there is no demand in the secondary market so prices are low.

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Relative life stability can factor in-I have made a couple of moves in the last 20 yrs that caused me to drink up or give away some things just to lighten the load, which in retrospect I could have held onto for much longer.

I’d say the average bottle in my cellar lasts 10 yrs, but I still have some things I bought 20-30 years ago.

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Average cellared bottle in my ~5,000 wine collection is 12.5 years.

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I have a small cellar (~ 600 bottles). I’m mostly buying when wines are released (some as futures). Cellar time mostly depends on varietals and winemaking styles. Most white varietals, with some exceptions, are consumed within 2-5 years of release. Some reds are consumed in that same time frame (some, but not all, PN’s for example). Some reds (CdP, Bordeaux, N Rhône Syrahs, Riojas, Brunello di Montalcino, etc.) I buy planning on laying them down for 10+ years before drinking. How long often depends on the producer and the cuvée. If I buy several bottles or a case, I may taste 1 or 2 earlier as the bottles age. No hard & fast rules. Sometimes you just want to open the bottle you want to open because it’s calling your name whenever you walk in the cellar.