I find myself drinking less wine per month than in the past…partially due to the travails of running around/traveling for work, and partly due to my growing aversion to hangovers which have only gotten more acute as I’ve grown old.
And so, I feel as if my consumption/acquisition ratio has taken a turn for the absurd, and I’m thinking of either downsizing creatively (hosting tastings, gifting a whole lot of wine, corporate bribes, etc…). Buying 6pks verticals each vintage of 3-4 Cru Bojos, wonderful Kabinetts, Petit Bdx, Mercurey, and Chinons is seeming a bit zany now…Anyone else run into this? If so, how do you pivot…only buy special occasion wines and say bye to the Foillards, Baudrys, and Huets of the world? Curious to see if others have run into similar changes in consumption habits.
The generosity of a hosted tasting is a way to share with your friends an important element in your life. I like that choice option.
If you give away bottles as gifts/bribes, you are not there to see the enjoyment proffered by the wine.
I enjoy the social dynamic of a well-orchestrated tasting. You can drink as much or as little as you please, and friends will have another positive experience with you to remember.
You’ll have plenty of good wine. Do a cellar audit to remind yourself of all the good wine you do have, and that might reduce the cravings to buy more.
Finally, one thing that seems to have worked remarkably well for me this year, is to make a shopping list of the wine you’d really like more of. Rather than stoking the wine buying fire, it helped me focus on buying what I really wanted, not what looked interesting / intriguing or juts cheap.
So I have had this problem for a few years now (buying way more than what I actually drink). So my approach was to (a) sell about 10% of cellar that I was not drinking/had too many bottles of and (b) radically cut back on buying wines across the board. Had to give up some REALLY IMPORTANT burg allocations to make this work, that was hard. I also looked at what I was actually drinking vs what I was buying and found some obvious opportunities to cut back (e.g Piedmont). Age and reality helped!
Only you can figure this thing out, but for me, it’s wine playing a role in an overall lifestyle rather than wine being the primary focal point. I love wine, think about it and enjoy it all the time, but don’t get me wrong, I have other passions that are actually more important to my life, not to mention my family and my career. Cycling and art, as passions, are actually more important to me. Where wine fits in is as a daily life enhancer. I buy many of these same wines you do, and what’s wonderful about our tastes in wine is that we can buy relatively affordable, unique wines that can be opened daily, with your meals, without guilt or regret. These wines pair beautifully with our meals, too. They are not the $100+ bottles that take a greater significance than the meal itself or to your spouse, SO, company or whatever you are doing while eating. I have many special bottles for certain evenings where the wine is elevated to the thing of importance, but that’s not my daily enjoyment of wine. Many times I find myself actually enjoying the more basic, simple dinner wines than the superstar wines anyway.
Perhaps scale it back a bit, incorporate wine into an overall healthy lifestyle, limit consumption to manageable portions that do not leave you groggy the next day. My normal is 1/2 a bottle, and at my body size, that’s perfect, I never feel anything from it the next day. I can go a little bit more, say to 3/4 bottle, but I do notice that it affects my sleep and leaves me a little hazed some nights, but not enough to really make a difference.
Hydration +1
I find I have less issues by drinking more mature wines with less complex tannins as well.
Sharing is a great social aspect of the wine culture. Have fun with it and learn too–I suggest doing some double blind tastings so everyone learns what they really like in a wine. You can create a themed tasting and really open some perspectives.
I’d be careful pairing down the collection…you might regret getting rid of certain bottles down the line when the malaise lifts and/or your day-to-day hustle eases. BUT, let me know when your next tasting is, and I’ll come on over.
I would never say goodbye to those wines as I love them. But I’d never buy 6 packs of them as I simply don’t drink that much. 1-3 bottles - most often 1 - of a given wine and I’ve given up on worrying about whether I’ll regret not having them 10 years from now. If they survive until then great, if not, then I enjoyed them young. As a good friend of mine pointed out many years ago “there will always be more good wine for sale”.