I’m another one of the spreadsheet guys. Sometimes down to the specific wine, but mostly just down to the category (Bordeaux, Burgundy, etc.), so I have some flexibility within the category when a great deal pops up. On the assumption that you (like me) have a finite amount of storage space and a finite amount of money to spend on wine, you have to decide how to use it. If you want to assume that income and available space will always expand to fit your wine buying desires, then stop reading now because you will not want to take this approach. Likewise, this assumes that your preference is to buy on release and store your wines yourself. If you prefer to buy mature wines at auction, this approach is not for you.
I came to this realization when I was first buying in the early '90s. I suddenly had a cellar that was way out of balance because I would just buy when there was a good wine at a good price and didn’t give it much more thought than that. Well, CA had a string of good to great vintages from '91 to '94 (so I bought a lot) and Bordeaux had a string of lousy vintages (so I didn’t buy much if any), and those were my two main categories at the time, so by following that strategy I had more cab and less Bdx in the cellar than I wanted, and I hadn’t set any “extra” money aside for the '95 Bdx vintage when it hit, having instead spent all that money on CA cabs.
Start with an idea of what you want your cellar to look like when you reach the “maintain” phase. For example, if you want to drink 1 Bdx and 1 Burg a month and you like your Bdx at age 30 and your Burg at age 25 (after release, not after vintage), then you need 360 bottles of Bdx and 300 bottles of Burg. Do the same for any other categories you are interested in.
Then tweak the above to fit your financial budget and your available space. If doing the above yields a need for 3500 bottles, but you only have room for 1000, you have to cut. If doing the above yields drinking 100 bottles a year and you like bottles that are $50 each on average, that’s $5,000 per year on those bottles AFTER you’ve built up to the “maintain” phase. Do you have that much available to spend on wine? If not, you have to cut either the number of bottles or the price per bottle (or both).
This gives you a cellar goal based on your target inventory for each category (which is simply the multiple of bottles to drink per year x years of cellar age you want (on average, of course) per bottle, and the target inventories for each should add up to your total available space and the bottles to drink per year x the average price of each should fit within your financial budget. So a simple one might look like this:
Bordeaux 12 per year, average age 30 = 360 bottles target inventory; 12 per year, average price $50 = $600 per year
Burgundy 12 per year, average age 25 = 300 bottles target inventory; 12 per year, average price $75 = $900 per year
Riesling 12 per year, average age 20 = 240 bottles target inventory; 12 per year, average price $30 = $360 per year
Total - 36 bottles to drink per year, 900 bottles target inventory; $1860 annual budget
Use categories as specific or as broad as you want. If you are a real Burgophile, have a separate CdN and CdB category if you want, or even one for each village. Or go the other way and just have a “France” category if you want, and give yourself some flexibility within it. For example, while Bdx, Burg, NR, and SR each have their own category in my cellar, I also have an “other reds” category for anything I like but don’t have the space to devote an entire category to, and this gives me some flexibility for a little of this and a little of that.
Once you have your cellar goal, adjusted for space and money, develop a plan to get there. This is the “acquisition” phase and precedes the “maintain” phase. During this phase you are buying more bottles each year than you are drinking, and you have to do some combination of drinking fewer bottles per year and spending more money per year than what will eventually be your annual budget as listed above. I suggest giving yourself a number of years to do so because a) this gives you time to adjust your goals as your palate develops (and perhaps as your available income or storage space changes up or down), b) The acquisition phase is even more expensive than the maintain phase so financially you probably need to spread it out, and c) (if you are only buying newly-released wines) this spreads your purchases out over a number of vintages so they don’t all reach full maturity at the same time. So if your goal during the maintain phase is to drink 36 bottles a year as in the simplified example above, consider drinking 18 per year during the acquisition phase, while buying 60 per year. This allows you to grow your cellar by 42 bottles a year while only buying 24 extra bottles a year compared to your long-term budget. It all depends on how many bottles you are starting with and how many years you want your acquisition phase to take (and how much extra money you can devote to wine during this phase).
Again, an example based on the simplified cellar plan above:
If you already have 480 bottles, then you can get to the 900 bottle target in 10 years by following the “buy 60, drink 18” plan just mentioned, since that grows your cellar by 42 bottles per year. Let’s say your 480 bottles are 200 Bdx, 200 Burg, and 80 Riesling. That means your proportions are off, but it’s easy enough to fix. You need to grow your Bdx by 160, your Burg by 100, and your Riesling by 160 over those 10 years. So your budget will have you buying 16 Bdx, 10 Burg, and 16 Riesling per year PLUS replacing each bottle you drink. If you drink 18 and divide the drinking evenly - 6 of each category - that means your buying budget for the remainder of the acquisition phase is 22 Bdx, 16 Burg, and 22 Riesling per year. If at some point you want to skip a vintage of one category (or buy less) because the wines are lousy that year, don’t spend that money on wines from a different category. Either backfill within that category, or carry that money over to the next good vintage for that category.
As your tastes shift (either based on what you like, or what you drink more or less often based on what you eat, or based on how old you find you prefer each category to be on average), adjust your cellar goal, and then adjust your drinking and buying plans accordingly. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. Your tastes will change, and you should not let the plan you drew up today dictate what you are buying in the future if you’ve fallen in love with some new category and fallen out of love with some old category. You should always let the plan control, but you should not hesitate to tweak the plan. In the extreme case, such as when you decide to abandon a category entirely, sell or trade the bottles away and use the money to buy the wines you need. In a more typical case where you just decide you need to cut back on Bdx a bit to make room for more Riesling than you originally had in the plan, start drinking more Bdx per year, and buying less of it, so that your Bdx inventory starts to shrink, while you do the opposite with Riesling. I tweaked my plan probably every 2 or 3 years during my acquisition phase because my tastes changed, my assumptions changed about how old I wanted my bottles to be (on average) when I drank them, and because at one point I was able to enlarge the cellar (and the wine budget accordingly).
An important part of all this is to stick to the “drinking” budget as much as the “buying” budget. If you drink too many bottles one year, or if for some reason you drink a ton of Bdx but no Burg one year, it throws you off. So stick to the plan (generally, you can always be flexible around the margins) - if the plan is to drink 10 Bdx and 10 Burg that year, then do that. If you find yourself not liking that because you want to drink more Bdx and less Burg, then modify the plan to fit your preferences rather than keeping the plan but not following it.
Then when you finally fill your cellar (a day that will seem far off, but it will arrive, as it has for me, I promise), you start the maintain phase and just buy and drink the same number of bottles per category per year so that your cellar neither grows nor shrinks. So in the examples above, you now go from drinking 18 per year (6 of each) to drinking the 36 per year (12 of each) you’ve always wanted, and you go from buying 60 per year down to buying 36 per year, just replacing the ones you drink, and finally freeing up some money for that trip to your favorite wine region.
Eventually you reach the shrinkage phase. If as in the example above you have 30 years’ worth of Bdx then this phase begins 30 years before you think you will stop drinking. If you are an optimist, plan this for age 70, but your actuarial assumptions may vary. When you reach this phase, continue with your drinking budget but stop buying that category. Eventually you will stop buying altogether. So in the simplified example, and using the optimistic assumption of age 100, you stop buying Bdx when you turn 70, Burg when you turn 75, and Riesling when you turn 80.
This is a bit too clinical for some people (OK, way too clinical for most people) but if your brain works the way mine does, this is the only way to get the cellar you want within the confines of available space and money.
I recommend the above for your “ageworthy” bottles. If, like me, you want some wine with dinner every night, but your budget and storage capacity don’t allow you to drink an “ageworthy” wine every night, I suggest a simpler plan for your much less expensive “everyday” bottles. Set a per bottle max price that works for your budget (with occasional exceptions allowed) and allocate a certain section of the cellar to store those bottles. When that section gets empty (as if!), buy immediately. When that section gets full, stop buying. Generally, keep it between half full and totally full and just buy for this section when you find an interesting deal (and have available space), and drink from this section any night that you’re not opening an “ageworthy” bottle.
Following this program means deleting a ton of offers that are otherwise good wines at good prices because you have an annual limit for each category. Use that opportunity to think long and hard about which mailing lists you want to stay on, and which offers you want to respond to. Don’t blow your entire zin budget on Carlisle before the Bedrock offer comes out (or vice versa) if you love them both and want both in your cellar. But if you can stick to this program, it gets you the cellar you planned for, within the constraints of available money and storage space.
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