How much did you pay for your wine collection?

How much did you pay for bottles in your cellar?

There have been many polls previously done on cellar size, but not as many polls on the value of bottles being procured for these cellars. There are two ways of measuring cellar value, with have different usefulness… (i) what a bottle is worth today or (ii) what you paid for the bottle. To keep things consistent, I will set this poll for the latter, e.g., “How much did you pay for bottles in your cellar”. This excludes cost of building the cellar itself, or cost of offsite storage, etc.

I freely admit this poll is less useful than the “how many bottles in your cellar” poll, but I think supersedes for notoriety!

Cost of bottles currently in collection? Lifetime?

What business is it of yours? And how would it even be meaningful unless you also knew how many bottles of each wine someone has? I know many people that have spent well over a million dollars, some many times that. So what? It’s their money. And it’s their business, not yours. Trust me, most people that have spent a lot of money on their passion aren’t going to be discussing it on this forum.

It’s an anonymous poll. I see no harm in asking.

And Charlie’s questions are good ones.

50-100k is quite modest given the wines often discussed in this forum. Seems like 100k is a sweet spot.

What was the average bottle count in previous polls?

Yup. Two very different numbers, especially for those of us who have been doing this for a while.

Calm down Chuck, no one’s strangling your kittens.

Cost of bottles currently in collection

The many respondents reporting six-figure-cost collections prove so. Oh, wait,…

I hope that, out of respect for the privacy of these anonymous people, that you did not peek at their responses.

After only six years of this hobby I have hit a number that is too ridiculous to ignore and have to make some changes.

He’s simply asking a question. Why so sensitive?

Do not ask him about the weather.

I thought you meant since I started collecting. I voted 1 tier too high.

I enabled re-voting to fix.

No clue

Aren’t you just asking how big something else is?

Not really! There are a couple different reasons for doing this poll: shameful curiosity, financial context for those who post on this forum, I was curious if a mean/median result would really spit out something like $80K (which to me was very simplistically, 800 bottles x 100) or something much lower/higher, I wondered if perhaps cellar values could be smaller for others given a different wine focus (e.g., Oregon/CA pinots vs. Burgundy), this was arguably also a back door honesty check into the poll on “how big is your wine cellar” question.

Personally, I was most curious to see where the median/mean would shake out. There is a lot of advice on the forum for purchasing at least 3-4 bottles of any bottle you cellar, many on this forum drink old world, many purchase the same wines (nearly) every vintage, a few store offsite which isn’t obviously economic for aging $40 bottles, and there was probably a success bias (pun intended!) to this hobby (i.e., if you have the resources to build a targeted wine cellar at all, you probably have more resources generally). I do recall many having over 1,000+ bottles in their cellar as well. Accordingly, $75-100K for a wine cellar was more than I casually assumed the median answer to be… but after running some basic math… it didn’t seem to be a crazy proposition at all for an “average” WB cellar. And of course there are those who buy by the case(s), buying that Dujac and DRC, etc. so figured there would be bigger numbers.

FWIW, I freely accept a smaller $ cellar may be better than a bigger $ cellar. That cellar may be more in-tune with their owner’s tastes and perhaps may have been more skillfully acquired (more off-the-radar gems, better sourcing). Lastly, a smaller dollar cellar at cost may be worth multiples of that cost today (e.g., acquired years ago at lower acquisition points, having since appreciated 10x) – and this adds a fair amount of survey noise if you misinterpret the poll for being cellar “current value” and not “cost to accumulate”.

Your cellar is generally worth what you paid for it over the years. Some bottles appreciate while others depreciate in value.