Wine consumption changed?

I thought about this when I read Kevin Shin’s lovely post on a bunch of great wines, on the host’s patio, with safety measures.

I don’t want to cry in my beer, but my consumption pattern has changed drastically since the plague, not for the better.

Sally and I live alone. A year ago she had health problems (ongoing, but responding to treatment) and her wine consumption dropped to very little, and most of that Rose (this from a serious lifelong red wine drinker). We would regularly have friends over, and when invited out I would always bring wine, both for that evening and to leave with our hosts. Most of our friends here like wine, few of them know anything about it. We also would regularly entertain guests from ‘away’ (as they say in Maine), family, friends and friends from the trade. We’d also meet wine geeks at restaurants for BYOB.

Almost all of that has disappeared. We haven’t had anybody in the house since February. Sally isn’t drinking. I’ve got a basement full of wine. Kevin and crew apparently enjoyed 15 bottles. If I drink a full bottle by myself, that is a whole lot, I rarely go there. Mostly I am going to the basement and looking for something to open that will be good the next day. As I have a lot of wine with bottle age, I have to be careful not to open something wonderful that won’t be the next day. I don’t like wasting the good stuff.

Enough whining, but asking how your consumption pattern has changed, and if you have strategies to see to it that your wines are served to people who appreciate them and that they are not wasted.

Thank you.


Dan Kravitz

I don’t really have a cellar apart from my old Amarone collection. And I haven’t felt the urge to pop any of those in a few years - taste for them hasn’t come back. So it’s DTC orders and allocations that keep me going, so mainly drink very young stuff. But consumption has def gone up. Me and my wife share a bottle pretty much every single evening. I don’t think it’s a problem yet, but I do worry a little about if this is the new norm. I did a half-assed attempt at just trying to limit it to the weekends, but that didn’t last - the days float together anyway! Also, I love cooking and it’s just no fun cooking without having a glass of wine. But it has reinforced to me that it’s worth drinking better wines. I think my cost-per-bottle average has actually gone up since all this started. Still taking a break from Pinot, but do have a fair amount of it sitting around.

We allocate a significant amount of our best (aged) bottles for family and friends. This year, because we can’t socialize with family & friends, we are drinking many of these bottles ourselves. Tonight, with a takeout from Sur in Carmel (delicious chicken piccata), we drank an 09 Littorai “Hirsch.” Wednesday night an '09 Ridge Monte Bello and a Saxum are on tap (OK, it’s our anniversary).

To make a long story short, we are drinking better wines on a daily basis. The younger stuff (great '18 Zins, Pinots and Cabs) can wait!

For us it’s a little bit of this (drinking lots of cherries we would have reserved for friends/family), but we are also taking the opportunity to explore new producers and regions. Averaging 3 bottles a weekend, with Monday thru Thursdays off

Quantity is about the same as before. I have stopped caring what I open. Everything is fair game.

I think I am in an unique situation in that located in northern New Jersey there remains a plethora of outlets for immediate purchase. I can easily satisfy my jones for buying new interesting bottles. Working in the trade I have not missed a single day of work due to coronavirus issues, be this related to my own health or due to business protocols/decisions on staying open. I’m lucky in that I can store my wine collection where I work and have continuous access as needed. I still hold onto many special bottles or bottles I had earmarked to share with Person X. This may or may not happen. In the spirit of your question, my wife and I consume 1-2 bottles nightly and this has not changed. What has changed is cellar depletion due to the lack of wine geek get-togethers where I’d bring 4-5 special bottles and let them have at it. Overall, my wine collection is slowly growing whereas I’d wish it was slowly depleting. But, yes, I do have a concern about holding on too long to “apexed” special bottles and not knowing if the day to share will arrive before the wine starts to unravel. I actually feel a twinge of regret drinking an awesome bottle by myself.

I definitely agree that consuming very special bottles, even if there’s 2 of us, is a tad regretful

Our wine consumption, (if that’s the same as conumption), has not changed, primarily because our routine/work hasn’t changed. Our wine sales indicate a lot of people are drinking or drinking more than before.

Since the March lockdown, I have drunk two bottles in total. Drinking alone is no fun.

If anything, I am opening up “special occasion wines” more frequently, and on weeknights. These are wines that I would normally take out for holidays, birthdays, or a monthly foodie night, for example. I do have friends over for patio social distancing, and I open nicer, and more wines than normal–and my friends bring out better stuff too. This goes for bourbon and scotch too (opened a 1998 Russell’s Reserve recently), things that I would just allow to sit on a shelf, I guess I got tired of looking at these bottles considering COVID-19!

I think what has shifted is the fact that I am cooking at home more, and enjoying more leisurely evenings, instead of going out to a restaurant. My overall spend is probably flat, since I am not going out as much due to COVID-19–though I have gone to a few favorite restaurants in the Minneapolis area over the last month. I did blow through a majority of my 2016 Myriad, Quivet, Becklyn, Carter, and Rivers-Marie (my favorite Napa cab producers), as opposed to letting some of their higher end vineyard wines age a bit. Still waiting on the Dr. Crane, LPVs to come around. Long story short, I am drinking better wine on a more frequent basis, buying more wine for the 2018 vintage than I normally would (and justifying it by my reduced entertainment budget), as well as eating better, and no commute–due to working from home for the foreseeable future.

I am spending more time on yard work, and on myself, I’ve viewed this as an opportunity to get back to some basics, as opposed to the hustle and bustle of my pre-COVID life. I am also a musician part-time, and I miss the fellowship of musician friends, as well as performing, with that said I DON’T miss drunken wedding gigs that go late on a Saturday morning, and an early church gig on Sunday mornings. Sleeping in on Sunday’s has been amazing. This may have been a bit of a ramble, but have enjoyed reading the posts on the thread!

When lock down occurred we didn’t have a restaurant to worry about at night so we found ourselves with an ideal opportunity to give the cellar a good run, which we did. We still managed to catch up with some friends in the privacy of our own home with appropriate social distancing. We now are back trading and into the old routine, but there was a time when bottles consumed jumped alarmingly. Now it is time to exercise a bit more restraint.

“Wine conumption changed?”

Some consumption occurred during the original post. [wow.gif]

I say go ahead and crack open a few prized bottles and treat yourself. If not now, when? It seems that this is not going to change anytime soon, so don’t limit yourself. If it is good the first night, it is a good bottle. Open something you love that you have a few of. Maybe select 10 bottles that are off=limit and open number 11. You’ve worked and spent time and energy into your collection, now is time to have some fun with it and let it give you something back.

drinking special bottles more often. Using a Pungo if I don’t plan on finishing or if I open something wife won’t like (Alsatian). Dan, get a Pungo or a Coravin.

When the pandemic first started, wine consumption went up a bit; it was a scary but exciting time, where a lot of energy got re-invested into cooking and pairing and enjoying evenings together with my girlfriend. As the second wave hit here in Melbourne, we took the opposite approach; we are not a bit tired of being home all the time and are cooking in a more functional way, like making a big batch of soup or curry and freezing the remains. Before, I would do fish, chicken, or one-off meal to be enjoyed with one particular wine in mind.

Meanwhile, my theoretical knowledge has been expanding and growing at a much higher rate than my practical one. If before I could, and would, participate in tastings or dinners, I now have endless time on my hands to read and geek about regions without the same rate of exposition to those wines. Eventually, when things go back to normal here, I expect a big spike in purchase and consumption to taste all the wines I have been reading about during lockdown. To be honest, I cannot wait for that to happen.

Most trophies are still tucked away, though drinking consistently better overall. I think the cellar is beginning to hit a sweet spot, and I’m happy to pull wines I’ve been laying down for 8-12 years. It should be fun for quite a while.

My story is a little complicated, because I retired from work and moved from NJ to FL simultaneously with the lock town, and there is the different virus trajectories and politics in each state. But basically consumption is up and anything is fair game. Again complicated a bit by the fact that pre-move it was all boxed up and I could not find particular bottles, and now I am totally organized and can find it all. I do not drink at lunch or in the afternoons -I learned a long time ago that it for me it’s a bad idea - but now these cocktail hour zoom calls with friends gets it all going earlier than the previous norm. We have organized some socially distanced “blocktail” parties with neighbors, but those are byo, so no sharing…yet. Purchasing is another issue as there seems to be no wine shops in Jacksonville, at least nothing like NJ.

A few things here:

We have been giving a lot of wine to friends. At first, the PLCB stores were closed entirely (not that they were great to begin with) and delivery to PA is very rare, so we dropped off 6 pack care packages with friends regularly. We did a pizza night where we made a ton of pies and scheduled our friends in 15 minute intervals to pick up a couple of pies and a 6 pack of wine from the porch off our kitchen. For one or two wine geek friends, we have provided the bottles for Zoom tastings so we can all drink the same thing. It feels good and helps a little with not being able to have people over. In the last month or so, with Philly doing pretty well, we’ve had a couple of small group distanced events and that has felt really good.

We’ve always cooked a lot at home and been regular wine drinkers, by which I mean we have wine whenever we have a dinner at home. Normally, though, there’s regular time off this routine due to pretty heavy work travel. Since travel is non-existent and I’ve been out of work, it’s a real change for us to be together every night at home. In many ways, we’ve enjoyed it. It has meant drinking more, though. The routine is open a bottle while cooking, have a glass, then have a bottle of something else with dinner, then often go back and finish the one we started earlier. Some nights we have less, but some weekends we’ll also have something with lunch on the deck. Consumption has definitely been up. We aren’t drinking to forget or self-medicate - neither of us work that way - we’re taking comfort, for sure. We plan in the morning what dinner will be, and what wine we’ll have, and then it’s something to look forward to all day.

We’re drinking almost exclusively modest wines. We haven’t had the interest or attention span for high end bottles. There have been a few exceptions here and there, but mostly we are reveling in easy, delicious wines that have either already been properly aged or don’t require it. There are a lot of repeats of our 10 - 20 regular drinkers and, rather than feeling repetitive or boring, it feels very comforting.

Edited to add: I don’t think any bottle that is enjoyed is wasted, however, I do choose different bottles when I think they won’t get finished. IIRC, Dan K and I are alike in that we very rarely find red wines better on day 2. There was a week Jonathan was away and I knew I often wouldn’t finish something I opened by myself, so I only chose bottles that I wouldn’t be upset if part of it got poured out on day 2 or 3.

Wow, this place must be improving! It took a whopping 7 posts to point out the typo in the title, and then only 1 other post out of 16 replies criticized that mistake. I expected at least a quarter of the comments to be pedantic posts about the error. Congratulations Berserkers for becoming less crotchety!

I struggle with this too. I am in a similar situation as my wife has gradually migrated to Rose and inexpensive (under $15) Pinot Noir as her “daily wine”, leaving me on my own for the stuff I enjoy. What I’ve found is that:

(i) I DO find myself “going there” far more than I used to, and will, at least 2-3 days per week, consume either an entire bottle, or at least 70%-80% of the bottle (and will often then consume, or at least “re-taste” the rest with lunch the next day, which is now possible with my “stay at home” work schedule), and

(ii) Coravin is a godsend for exactly the problem you have. It’s kind of a pain in the ass to use, but it is really perfect for having a glass or two of a nice bottle with little or no risk that it will go bad by the next day or two. I would never rely on Coravin to protect a partial bottle for continued long-term storage, and frequently will simply pop the cork of the partially-consumed bottle within the next day or two (and almost always within a week). However, it is really great for the purpose of being able to enjoy nicer bottles alone over a period of days rather than hours.