Interesting… 1,000+ bottles plus would be a collection from where I stand. What differentiates the drinker/connoisseur from the collector?
There are two reasons to collect wine: to be a consumer or an investor. As a consumer, acquiring and holding wine serves two purposes: having what it is you like to drink on hand and allowing what you have, to mature for future enjoyment. It really depends on what you acquire as to whether or not it will appreciate in value. And even if what you have has increased significantly in cost at retail, there is no certainty that will assure your ability to realize a profit on your holdings. My guess is that the vast majority of wine collectors start with the premise of acquiring what it is they like to drink. And for many, this can change significantly as the years go by. As one’s knowledge increases, there are sometimes opportunities to acquire select wines from select producers that will in all likelihood appreciate in value, either to be enjoyed or to realize a profit.
- Age (and therefore the expected span over which one plans to age one’s wines; 1,000 bottles makes more sense at 40 than at 75)
- Desire to sample wines over time (one bottle isn’t enough)
- Degree of compulsiveness (e.g., “have to have it,” “even though I don’t care for these, they’re hard to find,” “unbeatable price”)
Never underestimate (3).
This is almost exactly what I would have written.
To further elaborate on 1: say you like Champagne, Riesling, White Burg, Red Burg, Bordeaux, and Rhone wines. Now let’s say you want to consume about 12 each per year (6 cases) and you want to drink your wine, on average, with 20 years bottle age. If you have 30 years of drinking in front of you and you are aging the wines yourself, then you need something like 20 years of wine in your cellar (oldest ready to drink, youngest sleeping for 20 years or so) and, since you have years to go, you will be replacing wines you drink with on release wines. 20 x 6 = 120 cases or 1,440 bottles at a rate of consumption of 6 cases per year for only 12 bottles per varietal.
You can see how people, especially those who’ve been buying for a while and have a lot of drinking ahead of them, can wind up with a lot of wine for the purpose of consumption not collection.
Semantics and word preference, mostly. I don’t prefer thinking of myself as a “collector”, but there is no doubt the definition of “collection” applies to my cellar.
To me, a wine “collector” implies chasing labels and buying simply to “have”. I have small collections of other things i.e. the mini-bats from all of the baseball stadiums I have been to. I never intend to use those.
I intend to consume every single bottle in my wine cellar. It’s like collecting stamps to use as postage.
Welcome to the board, hope you stay around!
Instead of collector having any negative connotation, perhaps we could relegate hoarder as the disparaging word of choice. I wonder how many of us fall into that category.
I’m the same. There was once some order when I first loaded wines into the physical space but that didn’t last, nor did I expect it to.
I have no objections to the words collection or collector. My cellar is absolutely for drinking, not investment or speculation, but I freely acknowledge that there is joy in the chasing, buying, reviewing and the pure having of wine, in addition to the drinking and sharing.
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Another way I can feel, sometimes…
I’m too lazy to turn those mice into wine bottles and turning Garfield into me.
A lot has already been said in answer to your question Stephnie, I would say I have accumulated bottles with the intention of drinking and enjoying them, rather than hunting them out. The numbers are driven by the fact that some need keeping for 5, 10, or 15 years and I may not be able to find/afford them at that point. I am in my fifties btw, and reckon I should have up to 30 years to get through them. 
There is something to seeing a bottle for years in your cellar and then one day drinking it.
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