Purchasing recent birth year wines

First time posting… I’d like to buy a few cases of birth year wines for each of my kids (born in ‘14-‘18) and would appreciate any advice on which auction houses members would recommend or if there are other avenues to explore? I’m beginning to determine what specific wines I want and am hopeful over the next few years I can purchase each of them. Many thanks for your advice.

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It would help to know what your goals and preferences are for these purchases. Do you have a specific region you would like to focus on? Are you looking to grab big name bottles that are allocated?

I’m definitely not the one to ask for auction advice, but a lot of great wines in the '14-'18 range can still be found via online retailers if you are patient enough to scroll through wine-searcher. A wine-searcher pro account, if you already know the wines you are interested in, will often be your best bet to point you to the auction houses that have what you are looking for.

Benchmark is wonderful for picking up past vintages.

There are a lot of long threads on this topic you can read, to get more perspectives.

Some thoughts I had in the last one, replying to a good quote from Howard Cooper:

Howard Cooper wrote: ↑Sun Jan 17, 2021 11:20 am
“My sense is buying wine for the birth year of a child is more for the parent and less for the child, who may or may not really care. You will get a lot more out of buying wine from the year you were married.”

Or at least, your plan should be based around an honest question of whether the wine is more for you, or for your son or daughter.

If it’s mostly for you, then buy things you think you’d like at that age. Hopefully, your child will still appreciate the moment and the idea of it, even if an old bottle of wine isn’t his or her thing at that age.

If it’s more for your son or daughter to hopefully enjoy, I would say (1) why not wait until your child is 10 or 15 or something, when you have some idea what they’re like, and (2) the odds are better with things like riesling and Sauternes, which a 21 year old will probably be more likely to enjoy than an old claret, plus which has very good odds of continuing to hold longer until maybe a 30th birthday or some time your child might appreciate wine more.

There is no big rush to buy the bottles when they’re first released – it’s not like buying a 2010 wine is hard these days, right? Plus, by then, the picture of which wines are going to age well to 21+ years is much better than it was when 2010s first hit the shelves.

Check K&L as well, they have a tendency to get back vintage wines in stock regularly. Their live inventory feed is a blessing…and a curse…

As Chris referenced above, more likely this is for your drinking pleasure than your kids (who knows if they’ll even like wine). If you’re really trying to buy it for them, probably best to do mixed cases.

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That is what I refer to people when they’re looking for 80s, 90s, etc. OP is looking for 14-18s so I would say K&L. You can probably find a decent 6 OWC of some BDX in their birth vintages.

My nephew is 2014 but all I’ve got him so far for his 21st is a magnum of Old Sparky.

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Welcome to posting, Eric. Hope to see more of you.

I’ll echo what Howard said: buy the wine if you want, and if doing it “for the kiddies” makes it more worthwhile to you, so much the better, but the chances that your kids will feel the same way about wine you do is low. My son has a glass of champagne every once in a while but otherwise couldn’t be bothered, and a stash of wine in his name in the basement would do him little good and might actually make him feel pressure.

Nonetheless, if you like a type of wine that will improve with 21 years of age, you can always buy a couple of cases of what you like with the possibility of turning them over to the kids if they actually catch the bug.

As with most purchase questions then, the answer is “buy what you like from reputable dealers.”

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Your vintages are fairly recent. I don’t see why you need to go to auction houses. Instead, I would identify which regions you want to focus for each vintage (and also what the goal is… how long do you want the wines to last?). E.G. you can do Bordeaux nearly any year… you don’t need auction houses to find the ocean of Bordeaux out there. You can do Barolo for 2015 and 2016, which are still widely available. You can do Rhone as well. Of course Napa. And sweet wines which can go a very long time.

A better post may be starting a new WB thread for each year, and asking what folks would buy for birth year wine from that year (region + any specific bottle recommendations). I would be specific on your price point, bottle size, and desired aging curve.

One of my kids is 2016. Went in for Bordeaux 750s + mags, Barolo 750s + mags. I purchased other regions, but those were the main 2. I’m expecting the Bordeaux to be the longest lived, alongside the sweets I picked up. You can buy a mixed case of Bordeaux from a 100 different retailers. You can buy a mixed case of Barolo from 20+ different retailers. etc.

Personally, I would not wait 10 years to buy the birth year wines. Buying on release, means you control the provenance, format and have the widest variety of wine to choose from. I also tried to buy wines which can go at least 30 years, so the kids will be more mature when they need to enjoy them.

Unless you’re a Trillionaire, don’t get in bidding wars with Billionaires.

That means no Grand Cru Burgundy, no 1st nor 2nd nor 3rd Growth Bordeaux, no German Auction wines [to include no Keller from named vineyards], no Northern Rhone, no famous-label Barolo, etc.

For dry wines, purchase magnums [1500ml], not 750ml.

For sweet wines, purchase 750ml, not 375ml.

Get a Wine-Searcher professional subscription [personally, I don’t have one, but you need to go pro before you head off on this adventure].

In all vintages: German Riesling & Scheurebe plus Austrian Riesling & Gruner Veltliner. Also look into the finer Hungarian stickies.

2014: Hit the White wines hard. Puligny & Meursault & Chassagne first growths, maybe some Dauvissat or Dauvissat-Camus from up north in Chablis.

2015: Inexpensive Reds from the South & East of France and from Italy. I’d go hard after 2015 Loire Valley Cabernet Franc, 2015 Syrah-heavy reds from the Southern Rhone & the Languedoc, and pretty much anything red from Italy. For instance, on free Wine-Searcher, I can see a rather expensive 2015 Paolo Bea Pagliaro magnum, at Kogod, which ought to be rocking circa 2065-2090 [and I wouldn’t mind having the Passito to go with it]. Also, budget approximately a CENTURY for your 2015 Austrian “dry” Riesling to relax and soften up and become swallowable, especially if you can find it in 1500ml.

2016: 4th/5th/6th/…/23rd-growth Bordeaux. With 2016 in Bordeaux, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

2017: More great Whites throughout much of Europe.

2018: I haven’t had any bad 2018s from anywhere; everything in 2018 seems to be at least mediocre, and often rather yummy.

Many thanks to all for your thoughts and perspective. Much appreciated! I’ll keep all apprised on my hunting.

Not mentioned yet but 2016 and 2017 were great years for Vintage Port. Easy to find and will easily last 21+ years.

Not quite clear which vintages you are chasing. I get 2014 and 2018, but which of the three intervening vintages are you interested in? Also what is your budget? And are you going after quantity or quality?

I just bought my great niece born in 2019 a double magnum of the Pontet Canet 2019 for her rehearsal dinner. (According to her father, that is far into the future, as she will not be allowed to date until she is 35). [cry.gif]

The one easy answer for me is the 2014 choice. I have been something of a bore declaring my love of Vieux Chateau Certan 2014, and have more bottles of this than any other. For me, clearly the wine of the vintage, beating out some far more expensive wines.

I can’t help with auction houses, but I will say I have stashed a few bottles from my twins birth year away and there is no doubt it is more for me than for them (but something I have cherished). We opened two great bottles with friends to celebrate their Graduation and then their 18th birthday. I have a very special bottle that I intend to share with them when they turn 21, but again, I doubt they will love it. So far, these wines have been about celebrating them with memories made through the experience of the bottle with friends. I suspect when I they turn 21, though they may not appreciate the wine, the bottle will make another cherished memory for me. Cheers!

A few other thoughts.

2015: In addition to the Paolo Bea Pagliaro, another very fine Italian red [which still kind of flies beneath the radar of the Millionaires & Billionaires] is the Mastroberardino Radici Taurasi Riserva. It’s often bottled in large formats [on free Wine-Searcher, I can see 3L bottles of it in Europe], and in 2015 it ought to be a dynamite wine with aging potential on the order of a century or more [but it would likely still present as an undrinkable barrel sample if a child born in 2015 were to open a bottle at age 21 in 2036; depending on the size of the bottle, it would be a wine for them to open out towards retirement age].

2018: Cru Beaujolais in 2018 is huge, thick, gooey and frankly Parkerized. You can often find them imported to the USA in 1500ml format, and with the proviso that I have no experience whatsover in cellaring Gamay, my gut instinct is that in a large format, the 2018 Crus Beaujolais shouldn’t have any trouble going 40 years. [But I could be completely wrong about that.]

More 2018: I would also keep an eye out for 2018 dry whites from Northern Italy - the few that I’ve sampled have been very impressive. In fact, my hunch is that the weather for White wines might have held as far south as Abruzzo, and if that’s true, then you could look at investing in something like the Valentini Trebbiano d’Abruzzo in large format [although it looks like the 2018s have yet to be released from Valentini].

I have birth year wines for both my kids, but I’m going one further. Graduation year wines. Imagine bringing a case of wine to your class reunion parties.

id echo what others have said overall on two fronts: first, those are pretty recent vintages. you probably wouldnt need auction for most of them but should be able to find a decent selection on reputable sites like Benchmark, KL, Kogod, JJBuckley, Vinopolis etc.

second, i didnt drink a single drop of alcohol until i was 28. i have plenty of friends in their 30s who still dont appreciate wine. buy wines keeping in mind that you likely will be the one drinking them. you can still use your kids birthdays as the reason to open, but i think a lot of board members with kids run into their kids not being nearly as into wine as they are. however, in the off chance they do also love wine, hopefully you have taught them well and they love the classics. so thats what id go with, they age well anyways to boot.

I think the key is to not give the kids the wines at their 21st birthdays [or even at their weddings], but instead, in your will, to leave each particular cohort of birth-year wines to each particular kid to enjoy at his or her own pace.

Actuarially speaking, the kids ought to be roughly in their 40s or 50s or 60s when you die, at which point they ought to be capable of appreciating your forethought & investment, and also capable of actually enjoying the wines.

And who knows? - by the time you die, your kids might even have learned more about cooking than merely how to push “45 seconds” on the microwave oven.