I guess we repeat this thread every few years. My story is similar. A friend took me to dinner in late 1984 and opened a 1975 BV GdL PV. BLEW ME AWAY. Loaned me a book by Alexis Bespaloff and I stayed up all night reading it, went the next day with him to Trader Joe’s and spent the outrageous sum of $84 on a mixed case of wine. Moved from Cali to Bordeaux to Rhône and then met Burgundy before the 1990 vintage. Stayed there ever since, most of the other wines gone while drinking just Burgs, Champagne, occasional Riesling. Beyond passionate about Burgundy . . .
Great post Howard. This is a lot of stuff I am going to try to live by. A big thing I am concentrating on right now is diversifying. I know I love a few producers and a majority of my collection is made up by only a few producers (JJ Prum, Ridge, Aubert). Luckily Brian Stotter PM’d me early and gave me the advise to diversify a bit before going in to deep with only a small number of producers. It’s a complicated balancing act especially when a budget comes into play. You want to make sure you are buying stuff you know you will like, but you also want to try different things so patience is super important. That is something I lack so having everyone on here helps me avoid too much of a catastrophe. For that reason I have stopped buying retail for the most part for stuff I already have a decent amount of (unless I find a crazy deal) and have been sticking to auctions and pre-sales of new vintages. I have made a goal to purchase a new wine or two a week at auction or retail to try something new. I try to follow wine makers with a good track record and also some of the people’s recommendations from here. Once I have a really good grasp on a number of regions, producers I like I will likely stick to those with a few curve-balls thrown in because one can never stop learning. That way I keep it fairly stress free and can learn over time. I don’t drink nightly so I do have to remember that over purchasing can be a problem.
I am similar to yourself and others above who enjoy the entire process of wine searching, purchasing, checking tasting notes, consuming, and noting my personal tastes. The entire process is enjoyable to me.
Allen- I can say from an newbie’s point of view Burgundy and Bordeaux can be very daunting places to start buying wine. French wine in general can seem confusing until you study a bit. A resource like the forums can be super helpful to at least have some place to start tasting. I feel like the people who really know these two areas often have a world of wine knowledge. It would be super interesting to have been a fan of those two areas throughout the 1980’s, 1990’s and 2000’s as the popularity and prices elevated.
![[winner.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/07ec25c9fd71159fe15d7f1ba5fad64e91238d0e.gif "winner"){kind=small}
My generation had some advantages when we were younger in that most of the world’s great wines were affordable. Your generation has the advantage that there are a lot fewer famous names making horrible wines today. The enjoyment is the key thing.
One interesting thing I had when I was young and first came to DC is reconnecting with a good childhood friend that I had not seen since we both had gone to law school. We both had moved to DC and he had become very interested in wine. When I first got to DC, he and I would go to several stores on Saturday afternoons about once a month and taste whatever they had open. We also went to wine bars together sometimes after work - he was already married and after I was here a few months I met the person who would become my wife so the four of us started going to a certain wine bar in Georgetown that now has been gone a long time. All this was fun.
We are still friends and are part of the same winetasting group (mostly a Burg group although the group includes a number of German wine fanatics). We have gotten together monthly for years until Covid and frankly this is one of the things I miss most with Covid. Find or put together a wine tasting group if you can. You will learn more about wine that way than almost any other way.
Again, enjoy.
I just ended up buying faster than I was drinking and eventually needed somewhere to put it so I bought a wine fridge. Then I built a cellar for the overflow. Then I got offsite storage.
I couldn’t care less about verticals, joined three or four CA lists and never bought anything from them, and just kept expanding my “favorite” areas. I’m not worried that one day my palate might suddenly change. I now have some wines that I’ve bought decades ago and while I may wish I had more of them, what would I ever do with them?
To me the most boring thing would be to know that I had a few thousand bottles of a small handful of producers and I would be sentenced to drinking only those for the rest of my life. We drink wine every night and this summer we’ve been happy with lots of Italian whites, which is something I didn’t know and still don’t know much about.
Everything about my collection is haphazard. I never planned to “build” a collection and don’t understand that kind of thinking. It just sort of happened. So I guess it’s a “natural” wine collection.
One large influence I haven’t seen mentioned: attend auctions if you can.
Prior to auctions, I drank mostly in the bubble of my friends and family. I learned from those around me but my exposure was limited. This drove a lot of my initial purchases (CA lists, relatively large purchases of few producers because that’s what I knew). I was invited to an auction by a friend and two things happened: 1) I learned about non-American wine beyond first growth Bordeaux and 2) I met lots of people. This, in turn, led to dinners and tastings which expanded my horizons and shaped both my tastes and buying habits. Instead of being racked with fomo about missing the latest release or impatience from wanting to drink wine now, auctions gave me a broader perspective across time and producers.
With most things, it is advantageous to take an explore then exploit approach. The trick with wine is finding how to efficiently explore. Offlines (as mentioned above) are excellent. Live auctions are as well.
Now, my general approach is buy on release for my kids and at auction for myself. I only belong to a couple of lists and I don’t listen to critics like I used to.
Sounds exactly like my process! ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
The monolithic ubiquity of boomer myopia - the utter & complete absence of both introspection & extrospection - has to be the most profoundly boring & predictable sociological phenomenon of this era.
The millennials are largely insane, but the various sociological cancers which cause so much of their despair went malignant decades before they were born.
The boomers, though, the boomers don’t have any such excuse.
Muh free tuition at Cal-Berkeley for the Summer of Love.
Muh $1.95 bottle of Inglenook/Napanook/Martin-Ray.
SMDHing.
Definition of “Vertical”: how the business suckers collectors to buy off vintages, and overpay meanwhile.
Well put! BTW, just like life itself. Cheers.
True, true. Although I have many verticals in my cellar, I stick to verticals of good vintages only (more fun anyway). But to be honest I buy off-vintages of some wines specifically for larger, educational vertical tastings but then it’s always just a bottle or two - never even a case. Why drink mediocre wines, when you can drink much better wines?
I think one of the early questions you should be asking is why would you collect wine.
Is it only for pleasure, investment or a combination of the two? Then more detailed ones like
Do you buy young wines because you want to be responsible for the ultimate storage or for some other reason, like being able to buy allocated wines, different formats etc.
Other questions might include:
Would you ever buy from auction?
Would you ever sell wine?
would you go through the hassle of buying from Europe?
Where are you going to keep the wine?
Do you have enough great glassware?
Over how many years will you be drinking?
For me this started with reasonably priced CA zinfandels with family, then expanded to other CA reds and ultimately CA cabernet. I quickly filled a 470 bottle custom cellar and found myself with not 1 but 2 offsite lockers. I have dialed back some of my larger bottle purchases to preserve space and to minimize excessive spending, although this is a hobby that will test your budget constantly.
There is some great advice in the thread. I think for me my best advice would be to drink wine and buy what you enjoy. Going to tastings at wineries, local wine clubs, offline get togethers and visiting the various wine regions once this Covid nonsense is behind us will open many doors in your wine journey. I’ve been to Chile, NZ, Spain, Australia, Germany. Italy and have France scheduled although it is destined to be cancelled due to Covid. On these trips I will always work in 1 or more full days of tastings to learn about different regions. This helps diversify your cellar by region.
My parents had a cellar growing up. Wine was regularly served with meals. When was in my early 20s I happened to get into wine. Took over the beer and wine department in what was then my dad’s grocery store *(eventually became my store but I kept the beer & wine gig) Bought a small wine fridge, then a bigger one, then put a cellar in the basement. That led to traveling to wine regions, traveling for wine dinners, got in a regular wine group, etc… I’ve had a few different cellars in different house as we moved around over the years. Now I am storing off site.
I started accumulating bottles when my wife was expecting our first child. I figured I would keep buying the wine we normally would have consumed together if she wasn’t pregnant. Bottles started piling up. I installed some racks and they started filling up. I got an offsite cellar. Terrible idea. Since then, I started buying wayyyy more bottles than I used to, more expensive bottles than I used to and started buying bottles to age. I now have two offsite cellars and keep expanding them.
It’s weird because up until that point, I had a less costly and I think very good approach to this. I would buy wine that I wanted to drink in the short term when at home. Then, on my trips to France, I would drink older bottles and all the stuff I either found too expensive or too hard to find at home. That worked out pretty well. It did help that my father-in-law has an extensive cellar in France. Mind you, you can’t really say cellar… it’s more like a mountain of wine bottles without any organization or structure to the thing. It happens regularly that when taking out a bottle a few others will cascade down and break… Also, because of storage conditions, you sometimes need to uncork quite a few before finding a good one. So we end up having a lot of “boeuf bourguignon”. But then again, there are some incredible gems in that mountain of glass…!
As to my biggest regret: my dad used to have a wine cellar in Provence (not far from Avignon) when I was very young. But for reasons that seem terrible to me , he simply let it go. And I mean let it go. He gave all the bottles (and barrels, he was buying in barrels also back then) to the friend who was managing the cellar when we were away. So that was lost… how I wish he would have kept it all these years for his poor, sad, and thirsty son. It wasn’t meant to be.
Seem to be almost retroactive child abuse! ![[cry.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/853b6e76c6e8406be77a6727c2a27ad1672678b3.gif "cry"){kind=small}
I love this thread, its really enjoyable to read everyone’s unique history; and a bit of a time machine for what I was thinking at a given time.
I started considering collecting the night my daughter was born. It was '05, snowing hard, went to a LWS after 36 hours at the hospital and grabbed a 10 year old Bordeaux to sip and ponder how much I didn’t know and forget about how scared shitless I was. Advice from a friend. That wine was a '95 Ch Haut Corbin, right bank. Still have the empty bottle. Prior, I had table wines for dinner; things like Turning Leaf, KJ, etc… This was my first legit wine and with some age on it. It was life changing; and when I decided that I wanted to really study more of the craft and let wine evolve to be what it could be to recreate that moment over and over.
The first year was drinking anything to experience varietals and regions. <10% of that ended up being something I held for even 3 years. These stayed on their side on the closet floor. Once I had an understanding of what I liked, I started to buy more. Bordeaux, Rhone, Germany, Australia, Argentina, some Cali. That lead to my first wine fridge. and why buy one when you could buy two. HD had 2 fridges on clearance for a 80 a piece that gave me about 120 bottles capacity. Moved the closet to the cellar fridges to my wife’s delight for her shoes.
Next was learning from online sources like Wine Library, forums like Squires, magazines [Spectator], and that all lead to mailing lists. Now we’re talking about buying half-cases and cases I raided all my local wine shops for what they did not know they had. That filled up the fridges (plus one more clearance add-on) pretty quick. Decisions had to be made on what I wanted to be when I grew up. Laser-focused narrowly on specific bottles to explore/age, or go big on capacity to create a broader capacity to explore. At the time, I was in a position to move and factor that in when I moved. That worked out to a full on dedicated 1000 bottle cellar with ~250 bottles to seed it.
Once that was done, its strategy on where I wanted to invest time, not money. Sure, wine costs money; well, everything costs money. The space in my cellar is about investing time. That required a lot of thought early on about balancing regions and layering vintages. Over time that strategy has shifted however pays attention to what is relevant and succeeding with regards to my current tastes. They are not the same as years ago. I enjoy that I re-start a part of my collection over every year.
Personally, for me it was hit and miss. I started with recommendations in Hugh Johnson’s Wine Guide. With a limited budget, in 1999 I bought me 15 bottles of wines recommended by Hugh Johnson in French supermarkets, but did not really look at the producer. He was giving Savennières four stars, so I bought the cheapest Savennières from one of the recommended producers (I think it was Domaine du Closel) and thought I had a wine as good as Château Lafite-Rothschild (also four stars). Bought Château Fourcas-Hostens Listrac 1996 because Hugh Johnson gave it two to three stars. Bought Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine (forgot the producer) as Johnson gave it three stars, etc. I was actually quite happy with my purchases, but they were gone quite quickly.
Then I got into Riesling and bought mostly by cool and old-school looking labels (e.g. Robert Weil, Immich-Batterieberg, Maximin Grünhaus). Any plans to age these were not successful either. Then, in 2001 I did a trip to France and chose wineries that received two or three stars from Guide-Hachette and were low-priced. We started at the Loire and visited Domaine de la Chevalerie and a producer whose name I forgot near Tours, drove down to Bordeaux and visited a super-small producer in Lalande-de-Pomerol who only sells to private consumers and a small winery in Entre-deux-Mers, moved on the Rhône, visited two wineries in Vacqueyras and Rasteau, opened our wallets and bought six bottles of 1999 Hermitage at the Tain l’Hermitage Cooperative, completed our trip in Burgundy with visits at Domaine Bernard Colin (already organic certified back then, the winery no longer exists) in Chassagne-Montrachet and André Chopin in Comblanchien. Those purchases lasted a bit longer and gave me a better feeling what I like (the Chevalerie Bourgeuils, the Hermitage, the Burgundies).
Then it was trying out more what I like with single bottle purchases, a lot of Austrian and Italian wines, some French and Spanish wines and quite a lot of German wines, not only Riesling, also Grauburgunder, Weißburgunder, Silvaner. I figured out that German and French wines are my favorites. Luckily that was before I started buying larger quantities of wine.
I only started buying more wine in order to build up a cellar with wines I can enjoy after ten or more years of ageing around the 2008 vintage and bought a lot of Riesling, Burgundy, Beaujolais, Northern Rhône, Bordeaux. So far, I’ve been happy with a large part (not all of course) of my purchases except that I had to stop buying certain categories of wine at a certain point in time as I had too much in the cellar to continue buying (off-dry Riesling, Beaujolais).
Lessons learned so far (still a lot of lessons to be learned):
- Only buy those wines in quantities over 2 or 3 bottles where I really know the producer and how his/her wines age and whether I really like the wine
- Never step into the FOMO trap. There will always be the next great vintage of this or that. When all critics, social media people say jump on this or that new producer or wine, it can or cannot suit my personal taste. And the next promising new producer will be just around the corner.
- Even though it comes at a price, buying producers with a track record of producing consitently good to great wines usually pays off. They usually have their reputation for a reason.
- Tastes change and change again. I did not like Bordeaux for many years, but kept mine and am happy now. I totally detested most Southern Rhône wines for years, but quite like them now. So - at least for me - it’s good to have a fairly diverse cellar with something of everything.
- Always keep some cellar space and budget for new discoveries. For example, when I discovered Jura wines around ten years ago, I just urgently needed to fill my cellar with some Jura Poulsard, Trousseau, Savagnin and Chardonnay. At the moment, it’s South-West France.
- Personally, I think verticals and also allocations are something of a burden. Emotionally, it’s difficult to stop an allocation of rare wines or interrupt a vertical of a certain wine. But I’ve noticed that I have verticals of some wines where I simply don’t need every vintage. And every time I’ve let an allocation of rare and allocated wines go, I never looked back years later and regretted it. Rarity or exclusivity of a wine is not an important factor to me.
I think this is extremely important. Too many people fill up a cellar of wine and then find the wine did not age and I think a large part of this is because they did not follow this rule. For example, with California reds, if you want to drink your wines young, buy what you want. But, if you want to age them, buy the wines from the many wineries with a track record for making wines that age really well. Wineries like Ridge (whether Monte Bello or Geyserville), Chateau Montelena, Mt. Eden, Dominus, Stony Hill, Forman, etc., etc., etc.
The same holds true for Bordeaux (here the trick is finding wineries who have not changed the way they make wines) and other regions.