Wine "budgeting" - tips?

Up until now I’m pretty much bought what I’m interested in and drink, with only some rough adherence to price and quantity.

Quantity has become a problem - not that I can’t store it, but I realize I don’t need to be buying 50-100 more bottles/year than I’m drinking (while I can age to some degree I’m not really building up a 50-year cellar).

Put aside cost - any tips for how to rationalize my purchasing?

I looked at my annual consumption over the last couple of years: red/white/sparkling, and then broke it down within that by varietal and in some cases producer. I’m going to try to limit purchases to basically that, which obviously will mean some cuts to things (either less from each producer or cut some producers).

Any tips/ideas/guidance for refinement?

Tip #1: Get off this website. Now. You’re in a shark-filled pool of wine enablers.

+12

Seriously. This is no joke.

Says Enabler #1.

If you’re talking 50 to 100 bottles of rather mediocre $30 wines, for a total of $1500 to $3000 wasted per year, then you’d be much happier in the long run if you were to purchase ten outstanding 1er Cru Burgundies at $300 each, or just one epic Barolo at $1500.

A lot of it depends on why you’re buying wine in the first place, and especially how you intend to consume the wine once purchased.

If you’re like us, and you just want to find the best $14.99 to $19.99 table wines in the market, then you’ve got to get to as many FREE tastings as possible, because purchasing wines blind, in order to sample them [and then discover that they simply don’t rock your boat], will bankrupt you, and will lead you to loathing & despising this accursed hobby.

On the other hand, if your wine consumption is social or business oriented, and you have the opportunity to host very large parties three or four times a year, then there’d be nothing wrong with having an extra 50 or 100 bottles lying around the house. For instance, if your business/social standing required you to throw big employee/customer/vendor parties every few months, with 25 or more attendees per soiree, then your extra wine would vanish pretty quickly.

But if you’re sipping all alone every evening, and if you’re not a billionaire, then it’s a complete waste of time & money to be stockpiling that extra booze.

For me it would come down to two choices: Either go low ball in search of the very best table wines, or leapfrog over the mediocrities and purchase a relative handful of the very best wines.

Out here in flyover country, there’s nothing worse than doling out $30 [which is real money for us], on the blind purchase of a wine, only to uncork it, taste it, and think to oneself, “Meh…”

And throwing $30 at 100 of those “Meh…” wines every year would be financial suicide [plus a colossal waste of time - moving wine into your house is HARD WORK].

I love this. It made me laugh out loud.

Tip: tell you’re wife how much you actually spent on wine in 2019. I just made that mistake and my 2020 budgeting concerns seem irrelevant all of a sudden.

+1. Last fall, my wife shared a pie chart of her yearly expenses and asked to see mine. Turns out I spent more on juice than she spent on darn near everything else. It made for an awkward shipping season, and Berserker Day has me legitimately scared for the future of my marriage.

[rofl.gif] [rofl.gif] [rofl.gif] [popcorn.gif]

Boy have you come to the wrong place…

This is where I find myself. I’d recommend the following, assuming you have good storage:

1.) only buy bottles that are known to age well.
2.) only buy bottles that are easily resold if necessary.
3.) buy fewer but better.

I justify it to myself knowing wine is only going to get more expensive and I want a good cellar to drink from when I am retired and won’t have as much disposable income.

[rofl.gif] [rofl.gif] [rofl.gif]

See the advice about a minute into this about quality vs. quantity

I also think about this a fair amount.

I started “collecting” in earnest in 4 or 5 years ago following years of figuring out what i liked in wine. From jammy & too sweet, to big tannic monsters, to high acid lean wines, and now anything… balanced(whatever that means rolleyes ).

A trip to Spain got me hooked on aged Rioja. Not current release aged (which is a nice headstart don’t get me wrong)… 20+ years aged. I found them affordable (for the age and quality), and interesting, and damn delicious. (how restaurants there have these older bottles for such great prices…i have no clue?)

Plan: Buy current release Rioja for a nice price, and hold them to drink in another 10, 15, 20 years. Starting to drink them in 2025ish based on my first purchases, and ideally never running out. Maybe 4 bottles each of different styles from various classic producers. (LdH, Rioja Alta, CVNE, Muga, etc)

Practice: I have about 150 bottles in the cellar currently (not all Spanish, but obviously the focus of this post), and if I’m adding 30ish a year for another 5 years, I’d probably end up around 350 bottles (including non-spain contributions) before it starts to level off as consumption picks up.

Problem: Some days I have trouble justifying the expected ~$14K that will have accumulated in the cellar by 2025. Not to mention the space constraints. Not that I don’t look forward to a life filled with aged Rioja, but i mean, how practical is this desire…

Me: Billy Ray Valentine/Eddie Murphy
Berserkers: Chauffeur

Compulsive buying was my problem and this place, along with random e-mail offers is where the bulk of this compulsive buying begins. Get serious about which wines you really like and your actual consumption rate. Set a realistic budget and make a list of the wines you really want or need to buy on an annual basis - and make sure the total is within your establish budget. Stick to the established list and delete e-mail offers on receipt and/or unsubscribe from the lists to avoid temptation. My cellar total remains constant from year to year because I’m only replacing what I drink. I am on several lists - just because it is the only way to insure those wines can be acquired. When I come up on a long wait list (like Saxum, receently), eliminate something from your list to make room. This system works for me. Good luck and stay strong! Cheers!

Yeah – put together a spreadsheet with what you wish to acquire and budget it out via cash or trade. Then stick to the budget. Can’t afford something this month? Get it next month. Want it now? Trade in something for it.

It amazes me that people spend a ton of time cataloguing and pricing their acquisitions to the umpteenth detail in spreadsheets and CellarTracker after they acquire them yet never do so BEFORE acquiring them even though we’re essentially using the exact same skillset. This is why, barring the occasional exceptions of supporting our local wine industry (and I actually did not buy from Niagara’s wine region at all in 2019) and buying specialties from the SAQ in Montreal or Premier in New York (the last acquisitions from the former were birthday and Xmas gifts I did not pay for and the latter was just 3 half bottles and a full), through trading only I have actually managed to end up either dead even or with even more bottles than now than when I was actively purchasing.

Now obviously the extra gifts and slow rate of consumption also have something to do with this but it’s really not as hard to bypass things when you’re staring at them right in the face and evaluating what you really want and what you can do without. You’d be surprised how much restraint you actually have.

For some time we had been buying scads fo wine in the $30 to $50 range. We liked them all but we had few in the $20 price point. We eliminated most of the $30 to $50 wines and buy perfectly fine $20 or less wines and a are buyingfew more in the $60+ range. Overall our spending is trending down.

I had set an arbitrary upper limit based on past purchases and pared it down from there.

Unsubscribe from email blasts. It’s the only way.

Oh shit if my wife knew what got spent on wine last year it would be on.