Echinosum
Posts: 598
Joined: 1/28/2021
From: Buckinghamshire, UK
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quote:
ORIGINAL: sastewart
My wife and I have about 1,700 bottles in total with an average age of 10 years. We are retired and drink about 300 bottles a year - 70% red with the majority being old world and tend to like our wines with some age on them.
For us it is important to have a pipeline of wines that are ready to drink. We have been drinking wine for more than 35 years and have maintained a pretty good pipeline for the last 20. To me, this is the most important reason to have a larger cellar. We get together with wine friends often and always want to be able to pull an appropriate bottle or two from the cellar to share. I have purchased the vast majority of my wine as futures or on release but you might try purchasing a few older bottles at auction to see what you think.
Most importantly, Enjoy the Journey!
This is an important consideration - what is your drinking rate. Here we see sastewart has about 6 years of drinking in stock.
I have about 10 years drinking in stock. But since I only started restocking with the 2015 vintage, rather less of my wine is ready to drink. A lot of the wine I buy is fine to keep for at least 15 years, and a lot of it isn't really at peak until at least 10, sometimes more. And there is a lot of sub-$50 wine in that category, especially if you are buying Italians and French. In general, I find there isn't a lot of red wine of much quality of the kind I like that doesn't need keeping for 7+ years. And that goes for whites too. The chardonnays, chenins, rieslings, semillons, rhone blends, etc, I like need often also benefit from keeping 7+ years, and can be a lot more for some.
For example, I pretty much find reserva Chianti from reputable growers undrinkable, or at least not worth drinking, even with an 8 hour decant, until it is at least 10. It is so tannic and acidic, and I like it to have developed and softened out. And even normale chianti in a good year, like 2016, from a good producer will reward being kept for 10 years, even if I might start drinking it at 7. In lesser years I might start at 5. I don't even buy Barolo any more as I'm getting too old to wait 25 years to drink something, as that has been my experience of Barolo of any pretension. But even the Nebbiolo delle Langhe or d'Alba and Barbera that I buy from good producers benefit from keeping 10 years, and I have a few bottles of Barbaresco too, which can need a bit longer. And then there's Etna and Aglianico, and weird stuff like Freisa and Grignolino.... Italy is so diverse and fascinating.
So with this appreciation, 10 years isn't a ridiculous quantity to have in stock given the waiting time that is appropriate. (He tries to persuade himself.) Though I do keep about 70% of my wine in professional remote storage, where it is very easy to sell it if I drop dead or lose interest or whatever.
People have been mentioning Tondonia, for example, and that is generally released at about 10-12 yrs old already, which might seem they've already done the aging. And it is generally quite attractive to drink on release. But then it closes up, and you need to wait till about 20+ years for it to open out again. So even that is not very different from all the clarets, northern rhones, etc, that I buy that need 10+ years to get to good drinking condition....
And claret is a real bargain, btw. At least I think so. At least here in Britain there are clarets - if you choose carefully - even as cheap as $15 ex tax that are worth buying and cellaring. And by the time you get up to $30 there's some really excellent wine. Laroque, a St-Emilion, was mentioned. St-Estephe, Haut Medoc and the Cotes (Castillon, Francs) are good hunting grounds for high quality wines where you aren't paying a huge premium for the name. But there is also a lot of rubbish, and a lot of paying-for-the-name (eg Pomerol) so do your research. And see recent threads on second wines - some are excellent value, others you are paying too much for the name.
After France, my second largest area of purchase is South Africa, a little ahead of Italy. South African wine is hugely undervalued, especially the whites.
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A discriminating palate can be a curse.
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How many wines do you all celllar? - 
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