You have one year left to live. What do you do wine wise?

WINE TALK
21

I worked with a guy one time who guessed he would live to x-age. He also knew when he wanted to retire. His goal was then to drink a bottle a day in retirement until he died. So he did the math to calculate the number of days that was, and started buying wine, so that on his retirement day, he had that number cellared. Like many, when you hit retirement, you want your mortgage paid off so that is not an expense in retirement. Same for his wine, he wanted that expense over with.

22

Sounds like a real spontaneous/“carpe diem” kind of guy.

Did he have lots of thimbles so he could share his wines with others?

23

This might sound silly but why do you have to wait until 1 year left in your life to be doing these things? I recommend you start now as you might be drinking out of straw that last year with shot taste buds.

Get busy living or get busy dieing…

24

Hey Tom, I’ve got some bad news for you, my friend. You have only one year left to live.

I’m free most evenings next week, are those good for you? I’ll bring the U Haul and dolly with me. Oh, and thoughts and prayers and all that stuff.

25

To the OP, I would certainly not flinch at opening anything in the cellar- there would be no internal debate about whether I should wait a few more years on anything.

In reality I would do one of the below:

  1. I might buy a motorcycle and drive all the way across Canada.
  2. Make for damn sure that my family was completely provided for upon my demise.
  3. Pull the kids out of school for a year and travel.
26

Don, sorry to hear the bad news. I’ll come down and help you drink your cellar. [drinkers.gif]

27

Semi-seriously, I don’t think that enjoying great wines and visiting great wine regions is entirely incompatible with all the “I’d spend time with my loved ones” and “I’d travel all over the world.”

You’d have to strike your own balance between everything you wanted to do, but if I were to travel the world with my loved ones, I’d certainly enjoy good bottles along the trip and include some wine visits as part of my itinerary. I frankly get more enjoyment visiting Montalcino, Piedmont, Sonoma etc. than going to museums and monuments in Rome and London. But that’s just me.

28

Exactly. [welldone.gif]

I thought it was a no-brainer that we’d be doing these things WITH our loved ones.

29

First, I gather my closest wine loving family and friends and hold another private event a la Mike Grammer Berserkerfest where the stuff that was too good for the commoners was held back is opened and drunk. Not surprisingly, I have more than enough sweet wine to do this.

Then I contact my friend Ange who runs her own wine club events and tell her I want to do a sweet wine event where we will open my entire collection up and I give mini-seminars on late harvest wine, icewine, botrytis wines, Port, sherry, French sweet wines, Italian sweet wines, Aussie sweet wines, German Riesling and dried grape wines. Frighteningly, I will have more than enough sweet wine left over from the above event to do this.

Then I divvy up the leftover unopened bottles amongst a tighter circle of friends who are collectors. Amazingly, I will have more than enough sweet wine from the above two events to do this.

Then I will go to Niagara and proposition making love to the three most beautiful girls I have ever met through the wine industry. I might even actually do it with one, two or all three of them.

Then I will travel to every single wine region in the world that makes sweet wine: Alsace, Bordeaux, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Portugal, Madeira, Australia and Spain. I might even take one of the girls from above with me. Or two. Or all three.

I will leave instructions to my family and friends that I don’t want a coffin for burial or cremation. Just wrap me in biodegradable cotton and put me in the earth – preferably a vineyard in Niagara so I can serve as healthy compost. No, I’m not kidding about that one.

Lastly I will also post a message on the board asking Berserkers with Yquem to travel to Canada and donate a bottle at the gathering of my friends and family and to open them, drink them and toast with them after I am gone.

And then I want everyone to move on with their lives and forget about me.

30

I don’t think you can actually do that legally. And that would be a pretty grim task for your family and friends to have to take your decomposing body and secretly dig some hole to dispose of it, unless your family are the Mafia or Zetas or something and used to doing stuff like that.

Just something to think through a bit further if you actually mean to tell them to do that.

31

I agree. I know someone who worked for the government. Did not retire until he was almost 70. Planned a special retirement vacation with his wife for years. Went on the vacation - while there, dropped dead of a heart attack. If there is something you want to do, do it.

If I knew I had only a short time to live, the one really wine-related thing I would want to do is buy a bottle of Romanee Conti and drink it (with wife and friends). I think this is the only grand cru vineyard I have not had wine from.

32

Okay, Tran piqued my curiosity, so I took a quick look. I guess you often can do this, usually if it’s outside the city limits, on private property, and often with the requirement the property be larger than a certain size, like 5 acres. I don’t remember if Tran lives in Canada, it may be different there (but if so, I hope you don’t die in the winter; digging a grave in frozen ground would be tough).

http://realestate.msn.com/rest-at-home-forever-home-burials-are-surprisingly-legal?page=2

Sorry for my rush to conclusion there.

33

I pretty much drink whatever wines I have on hand. I don’t necessarily save for special occasions. Of course there are exceptions to that, but I’d prefer to drink really good wine that I like rather than saving it all for later in life. The Ferrari just wouldn’t be a good financial move at this stage, so that will be on hold. Indefinitely. [berserker.gif]

34

My immediate thought as well

35

For better or worse, it’s actually not. I think a relatively small percentage of people (except perhaps the extremely old) die within a relatively predictable time frame inside a year (but longer than a few days/weeks). At most 1/3 of deaths result from cancer, which may be one of the most easily predicted deaths (but not all of course). Others are heart disease, accidents, stroke, etc., which usually are unexpected. Worse, for those with some predicted death date the treatment may preclude wine.

Anyway, if I don’t fight the hypothetical, I’d drink stuff that I would otherwise have saved and make sure what I couldn’t drink ended up in proper hands.

36

So, no one is concerned that, at that point, they might not have any interest in wine, etc…or any appetite?

I’d like to think I would, but…

37

My illness won’t impact taste, thought, or my ability to get around. It’s going to be a great last year. champagne.gif

38

That’s what we’d all hope, anyway…

39

As Chris said, family time and party time would largely happen concurrently. Time for family, and time for wine, with lots of overlap.
The big change in my drinking habits would be budgetary – with just one year on the clock, every bottle I opened would be “special occasion wine”.

My internal drinking calculus today considers inputs like projecting another 40+ years of life, using a finite supply of dollars. Naturally, this results in the need to space out the most expensive bottles, with lots of less expensive bottles between the blowout nights. With one year on the clock, I’m going to shuffle the drinker wines to the rear of the cellar, and focus on nothing but the cellar’s crown jewels. Anything I don’t get to in that year will allow for an epic party in my memory, following my departure.
champagne.gif

40

Based on what I think the OP was going for (could be wrong), let’s eliminate the doom and gloom part.

Doc come in and says "you have a long life ahead of you to spend with your family, but you have a condition where your taste buds are diminishing, i could see you losing your ability to taste in a year. Focusing on the wine part, what would you do?

Start pounding your cellar? Take some epic wine related trips? Buy a few gems you want to try but never got around to buying?

i’d take the trips I already mentioned, I’d want to try some 40 year old Penfolds Grange, some super old D’ Yquem, and shoot for a few older First Growth Bords and Grand Cru Burgs - since I won’t be buying wine anymore in a year, I could afford to pony up for a few of these.