Wine "budgeting" - tips?

[Tim_Heaton]

Remove yourself from any and all “lists”, immediately.

Set, and adhere to, an actual budget. Not any more difficult than that.

[JDavisRoby]

For wines you intend to cellar. How many bottles of the same wine do you get?

How many do you want and how many can you afford? Seems pretty simple.

I can’t believe how obsessive some people are about this. I would absolutely stop drinking wine if I had to go through any of these calculations!

I don’t consider myself to be or wanting to be obsessive about it but I am trying to avoid (now and in the future)having a room full of bottles I don’t want and can’t sell. I don’t see the wine I’m buying as a commodity but buying wine does scratch that node in the brain that likes buying stuff. Want to avoid getting stuck with it at some point if my tastes or financial situation changes.

It’s also about trying to understand how a wine drinker with a cellar moves thru the hobby. It’s obvious many on this board have found themselves at burgundy or champagne as their final stop on the wine journey but what were they varietals they enjoyed along the way. I’m at a Rhône variable stage now with Left Bank Bordeauxs seemingly up next.

Trust me, I don’t want this to be work or not fun!

[Yao_C]

I’d be screwed now if I loaded up on age-worthy wines that I bought and liked in my 20s.

Another reason to buy fewer high quality wines - if your tastes change they’ll be easier to sell down the road to replace with your newly preferred wines

[David_Glasser]

I’d be screwed now if I loaded up on age-worthy wines that I bought and liked in my 20s.

Another reason to buy fewer high quality wines - if your tastes change they’ll be easier to sell down the road to replace with your newly preferred wines

If you mean “buy fewer bottles but of higher quality wine,” I agree to a point. It also depends on region. Reds from Bordeaux and Burgundy will hold or gain value if top tier, not so much German Riesling, Port, or any but a few California wines.

[GregT]

It’s also about trying to understand how a wine drinker with a cellar moves thru the hobby. It’s obvious many on this board have found themselves at burgundy or champagne as their final stop on the wine journey but what were they varietals they enjoyed along the way. I’m at a Rhône variable stage now with Left Bank Bordeauxs seemingly up next.

All reasonable. But most people don’t start out with a cellar or even trying to amass a cellar. There are a few who’ve posted here saying that they want to start doing that, but those are outliers and IMO pretty illogical. Most people try a little of this and a little of that and they like something and they buy more of it and before you know it, they have more wine than they’re going to drink in a week or a month. And they find good deals and pick up some of this and that, perhaps more than they would have if the deals weren’t so good, and then they have more wine than they’re going to be able to drink in the near future.

The biggest myth, to my mind, is that there’s some kind of endpoint, or some place you arrive and decide you’re no longer interested in trying anything different and you simply want to drink what you already know you like. In the US and on this board it’s popular in some quarters to stop at Burgundy. But there’s no real need to do that. There are wonderful wines from the Rhone and I know many people who found Bordeaux and never drink anything outside of that. Many of the latter are French and live nearby the wine regions, so they drink locally and they’re satisfied forever. That’s not to say it’s the norm, but some of those people have acquired quite large cellars over the years, filled with older Bordeaux. I know people in Spain who have done the same and in both cases it just happened organically and mostly out of convenience.

In the US, without an historic wine culture, we often pick and choose and explore and our friends and families won’t think we’re disloyal or weird. But there are people who get on lists and collect lots of CA wines and that’s OK too. The part that flabbergasts me is that people imagine they’ll know what they feel like drinking one evening five years hence and they therefore buy x number of bottles of that, after which they’re packing in something else. If you like Cab-based wines, and you like them old, and you have a place to put them and you can afford them, buy some. Same with everything else.

As to not wanting them after a while, if you’re not confident in your own tastes, don’t buy any. Why think that you won’t like something next year that you like today? Or next decade that you like today? Think of any food that you liked ten years ago. Do you despise it today? I suppose it’s possible, but it’s not how most people are. If you love grilled pork chops, you may eat fewer of them in the future for some moral or medical reason, but you generally won’t stop liking them. And so with wine.