Ah, to be young and … addicted!
I hear you. I just moved to Napa in November from Chicago and it’s a bonanza of wine. My cellar has nearly doubled in a few months. Not having to pay for shipping, and a lower sales tax, and access to so many good wines has really hurt my bottom line, but I’m happier for it.
Excelsior!
I think I still qualify as young and certainly feeling very spend-y! About to hit the 4-0 and we are done having kids so I think this coming decade will the very wine themed! I’ve got a lot of buying to do to fill the capacity we’re not using yet. Added a wine wall for under the stairs after moving in, and added a second wine wall to the basement recently (both smallish). Have a passive utility room in basement which keeps a constant 55 degrees year round where I have one rack now with room for more if needed. That’s probably combined capacity for 500-600 and I’m not 1/3rd of the way to filling it yet. Have a wine fridge in the kitchen for ~50 bottles which sees a lot of turnover as we usually pull 3-5 bottles per week from that.
Buying has been mostly Oregon Pinot and Burgundy, German Riesling, Brunello and Barolo and Cali Cabs. Live near good retail but have also been lining the wallets of Winebid occasionally too with that 17% buyers premium, to fill in some gems or older stuff. Want to leave room to diversify the buying i’ve been doing so trying to get more grapes and regions into the everyday fridge to explore things I don’t drink much or at all. Hey actually made some progress at that today! Bought stuff I never drink - a Kiwi pinot, an Aussie Viognier, a S. African Chenin blanc and a bottle each from Spain and Portugal of white grapes I’ve never even heard of!
When I get to that 600 bottle mark I will need to figure out plan B as I doubt that is where this stops. I was the kid who had the 50,000 card baseball card collection by the time he hit middle school. Realized all that cardboard is fairly useless at least we can drink this wine.
40 years old, two kids. I’ve basically stopped buying high-end burgundy (although I splurge on a few bottles of Rousseau some years). I still buy mid-range red burgundy (and the mid range has gotten pretty pricey) and no white burgundy. But German Riesling buying has accelerated rapidly, particularly for auction bottles, and it isn’t going to stop anytime soon. It’s so cheap relative to the quality that I anticipate 300-400 bottles a year for the next five to ten years.
I never back fill and never will. Storage is too important. I buy on release or not at all.
Drinking through some pretty meh village and 1’er red Burgs on the weekend at the kind of prices I used to buy serious GC’s for makes me realise I am glad I started buying 20 years ago, and not recently…
I’m right there with you. I didn’t drink AT ALL until two years ago. On the bright side, I skipped the “i can’t afford anything but crappy alcohol” phase. on the downside, I have expensive taste compared to a 20 year old who can’t afford anything but crappy alcohol.
I think I still win the thread so far, 30th Bday was this month! but I’d love to see a poll on this.
30 here. No kids, just two large furry ones. Touring musician who spends most of the year on the road drinking roll-of-the-dice dressing room wine, and buying allocations from 6-7 producers every release. Just in the last 6 months have I started to backfill older vintages from Envoyer (my new best friend and my accountant’s arch nemesis) and others of the like. Lots of Northern and Southern Rhone, Rhone rangers, Washington Syrah (can you see a trend here?), etc. Usually go through 3-4 bottles a week when I’m actually home, but yearly purchases are in the 100-150 bottle range. Carry the torch!
Just turned 40, longtime girlfriend, no kids, just my FurBaby. Started collecting in earnest about 4 years ago. Have 350 bottles mostly in an off site, but some hang out in the 40 bottle fridge at my place. Mostly high end Napa, some 2010 Brunello. Heading to France in May so I expect I will be catching the Bordeaux bug in a few short months.
Other than my mortgage, wine is my second biggest monthly ‘expense’. I do well in my career, max out the 401k, participate in deferred comp and stock purchase plan, and still manage to save some coin every month.
Sometimes I think I could be doing better things with my excess income, but then I quickly remember that I love wine, collecting it, and… drinking it.
I’d love to have a cellar one day with 5000 bottles, and a dedicated area in my future home to showcase it.
Maybe things will change with life, but until then, ride it till the wheels fall off!
34 and two kids under two. Just getting started on my collection.
We are married and have no mortgage, with just one adopted eight-year-old cat
I want to buy still, but cannot find what I want.
just turned 47, wine has absorbed a fair chunk of my funds for the last 20 years,
2016 burgs and 2016 northern rhone are my last vintages there, BDX finished with 2016EP, 2016 Northern Italy will also be my last vintage there, I will probably keep my Tempier allocation until 2020.
I still like to buy, started buying young in the mid-1990’s at Joseph Phelps, they used to have a cellar where you could walk in, talk to Keith, and buy back vintages.
I would love to buy from Francois, lots of hurdles between here and there.
where in France? Also, I suggest if you wanna go to some top chateaux, you either need to book it ASAP or get a guide with an inside track!
why so young to stop??
- 2 small children, one former fur-baby now getting comfortable in middle age. Both working. Big mortgage in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. Have big plans for renovation of the house (and would love to put in a cellar since I pay thousands a year to store wine offsite) which will cost a shitton of money. Have been fairly profligate in spending since my salary increased from surgical resident to surgeon and now need to dial back. Have lots of stuff I love for both near term, long term and every-member-of-family-birth-year-wine. Trying not to get caught up in looking for verticals and other such traps. Have been fairly good for last few months. Maybe I will start buying again once we get the house together… or maybe I’ll be too busy paying for kids schooling and vainly attempting to save for retirement…
Matt,
I have been buying a lot more wine than I can drink for 20 years, the 2015 vintage Burgs will be getting into gear when I turn 70 and the 15 and 16 BDX will be coming right when I am 75 or 80, I have a lot of very very good wine and I have bought by the case for most wines. I want to drink these wines at their peak and I have enough vintages stored away to allow me to drink extremely good wines any time I want. Plus the pricing on the great wines is getting uncomfortable now, you have to stop sometime. Wine is just part of my life not my whole life
- 2 kids. 1 wife. Now over 20 years of cellaring wine.
I keep trying to stop the madness. But it hasn’t worked out for me so far. There is always hope! Unfortunately there is always another vintage as well. Not to mention the past ones.
I know I am going to sound like Victor here, but collecting kids is a lot more expensive than collecting wine. But the dividends are incomparable.
But, with wines, one can put them away or even auction them, if they might not show as well as one had hoped.
But for me being a few years older than you, this is exactly my situation, too. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
I’ve been trying to focus on a couple regions recently: Bordeaux and Loire. Bordeaux because the '14 vintage, I fear, is the last true “Great QPR” vintage we may see for a long time, seeing as how prices have quickly risen back to fairly ridiculous levels on the strength of the much-hyped '15 and '16 vintages. And Loire because I’m betting that’s the next region I love for which pricing will be ruined by hipsters {cough cough N. Rhone cough cough}.
Really, though, the region I most need to focus on is My Cellar; I literally have more bottles right now than I do space in which to properly store them. 
Until you change your avatar, you are losing . every . single . thread . in which you post.