Half cases of RWT

As I sit here typing, I’m pretty beat.  I spent most of today in a climate controlled storage facility where I keep my wine, moving bottles from my old storage unit to a larger one.  Wine – heavier than you might think!  So today, the topic is collecting wine, which it seems I do.

Before I talk about collecting wine, first I must say though that I collect wine in order to then drink it.  I have nothing to say about wine as an investment, because I have not nor do I have any intention of ever selling wine that I have bought.  It’s not a judgement thing – I have been a grateful customer of people who engage in wine investment – but it’s just not how I operate.  A bottle of wine is potential happiness, and sometimes static happiness as well, but for me it’s not something that I’d be interested in converting into cash.

There are a number of reason to collect wine.  The first is that by having a collection of wine, you’re more likely to be able to summon forth the right bottle at the right moment.  For a given meal or special occasion your local wine merchants may be able to help you, but having a ready supply on which to draw is often not just convenient, but sometimes irreplaceable.

Second, bottles change over time as they age, and the character you get from a bottle that’s been properly cellared for a decade or two is very different from what you can get from a current release.  Also, such bottles are usually very difficult and/or expensive to procure on the open market, so your cellar might be the only source for a particular wine/vintage.  Aged wine doesn’t appeal to everyone, but I certainly enjoy the secondary characteristics that come with time.

Third, each bottle in a cellar can be something of a stored memory, brought back to the fore in the drinking.  Most of the wines I’ve collected have been put away during the time that I’ve been married, and for many of them they conjure up a memory of when my wife and I bought the wine, or when we first tried it.  I came across a bottle of Sassicaia while looking through the various cases and was immediately brought back to the night I proposed as it is what we were drinking.  Likewise I found a bottle of Jermann’s Dreams which we drank together on our honeymoon.

There are certainly downsides of collecting wine.  First, it takes up a fair amount of space. Second, it must be stored carefully, meaning somewhere generally cool and dark, without vibrations or temperature variations.  I hope at some point to have a cellar at home, but for now I stick cases and bottles in a wine storage unit, which leads me to downsides three and four, it can be inconvenient and expensive.  So really, if you drink wine enough and care enough about the wine you drink, I encourage people to collect wine, but it’s something best done thoughtfully lest you find you’ve built up a collection of expensive vinegar.

My collection went into storage a couple of years ago when we moved from a location with a cellar to one without, and they were put into the unit in some haste, and without a proper inventory.  That’s not good for a few reasons.  First, if any bottles had gone missing, I might have never known.  In my case, I have no such worries – it’s a secure facility, and my collection is neither high profile nor particularly valuable, give or take a few pricey bottles.  My collection of half-cases of RWT from 1997 to 2006 is still complete (mostly pictured above – the 1999s are not in their original box).  The real problem though with not knowing what I have in storage is that wines can age past their prime without being drunk.  I found a rosé which most likely would have been good to drink a few years ago, which is a bit of a shame.

On the other hand, there are some joys to not knowing what you have.  Some wines which I might have been tempted to drink now have (what I see as) the benefit of a couple more years of bottle ageing.  The bigger joy is finding bottles that had been forgotten, ready and waiting to be drunk.  For instance, it turns out I have another bottle of Dominus, this one a year older than the one I enjoyed so much yesterday.  I have not one as I had thought, but two bottles of 2005 Silex from the late Didier Dagueneau, which means I can drink one and still have another for years down the road.

That said, I will inventory my wines, not so much to make sure nothing goes past its prime, but rather just to know what I have and to better be able to summon the right bottle at the right time.  I think the collection weighs in at roughly 65 cases, which is too many bottles to remember, so a spreadsheet/database is required.  Oh, and there’s a nice clutch of large format bottles, about which I will blog in the near future.

And to tease further upcoming posts, I took a few bottles out of storage as I was organizing.  One is a particularly rare varietal which I look forward to documenting, and a further three will have to be a special tasting on their own.  Think big hair and shoulder pads.