Lets start another poll. Whats your most expensive bottle. Lol
The poll is a fairly silly unless you know how long someone has been collecting. Someone spending $250,000 over two years is different than a collector paying the same amount for wine over 30 years. Then, to really make it interesting, you would also need to know the level of income of the collector because their percentage of disposable income allocated to wine proves how crazy they are, or not.
That’s quite true. And you’d also have to know if they were buying on points, having responded to the numerous “Congrats to so and so for getting 100 points from such and such!”, or were buying based on being on lists, or had collected things of interest specifically to them over the years. And most of all, you’d have to know whether they paid full retail or not. I buy and drink a lot of fairly inexpensive wines pretty quickly. Stuff that’s over say, $50 or so, or that I’ve kept for 20 years was almost never purchased at full retail prices.
Checking Cellartracker…“Holy sh!t!!! My wife is going to kill me if she ever sees this! I have to stop complaining about her shoe purchases!”
I don’t mind voting in the poll – find it fun even. But damn, it is better just to not look at what I’ve spent on the wine currently in my cellar. The only good news is that CellarTracker thinks it is worth 4.6% more than what I paid for it. Um, hooray?
The bad news is that my pending purchases will add another 15.9% to the cost of what is in my cellar, and that’s not including the Schrader offer which just appeared in my mailbox. Oh, and there’s a bunch of wine I’ve ordered over the last 2 years from various wine tastings at the country club but haven’t picked up yet from their cellar.
I comfort myself by realizing that I’m nowhere near as crazy as a lot of you guys are on here, so at least there’s that. 
As more poll results come in (at 200 now), the dispersion doesn’t really change which I find interesting.
I dont think it will change. U have to consider different age groups and length of collecting/buying period. The % will be some what fairly spread out.
I feel you. I accidentally ran out of space by 2x.
FLAWED POLL!!!
I think it’s a fun poll. Not really looking for a comprehensive conjoint analysis here are we?
Does this include alimony payments cause by the wine obsession?
So an average of $50k-$100k to play. Not bad when spread out over a number of years. Another interesting way to look at cost might be your average annual consumption times your average cost per bottle. For me this is ~18,000.
It doesn’t matter how quickly folks spent the money, or the extent to which folks got great deals. The poll simply reflects how much was spent for what’s there. The poll question isn’t flawed. The “buckets” aren’t all the same size, although it does bear noting that, somehow, the chosen buckets have given us a damn-near perfect bell curve, which is quite impressive.
Hahaha, good one Victor!
Next poll: How many ballers are there on your wine forum?
Answer: too many!
From the results, I’d say most people overpaid.
Mmmm . . . after taking into account that some of the responses may not be accurate, and also that the responders may not be representative of all of us and maybe skewed to the upper range , I still come to this conclusion: WOW!!!
The poll as phrased doesn’t take into account money spent on wine that has already come out of the cellar. What if you spent $50,000 per year on 100 bottles but drank 90% of it the following year, while again spending $50,000 on another 100 bottles, etc., and then stopped after ten years. You’d have 100 bottles on which you’d spent $50,000 - but you’d have spent $500,000 on wine over that ten years.
Now, imagine you’d been doing that for 25 years.
That would be a materially-different inquiry.
Again, this poll is about how much money you spent on what you currently have sitting around. The poll question is extremely straightforward, not vague, and not ambiguous.
Maureen brings out a good point. The question may be straightforward , not vague, and not ambiguous, but is it usefull? Does it give someone the tools to make any relevant deductions?
Cheers,