Starting a cellar / newbie help - six years on

My little cellar is taking shape. I now have 47 bottles ranging from nice Bordeaux to cheap Asda stuff. I have 35 bottles I am happy with & it will of course evolve over time. For me most of the wine is for drinking within the next few years as I cannot really afford to spend hundreds to lay down.
Great fun and interesting learning process. I've already made plenty mistakes but happily none too expensive yet.
 
That's kind of how I started too Willie and a few bottle here and there soon begin to mount up and picking up some extra bottles in sales and suchlike.

I still have many of the earliest bottles as they are claret with a long life ahead and the only issue is picking the right to time to despatch some of your oldest friends!

Welcome to the forum too.

Hit men are very cheap in Thailand... :eek:
 
My little cellar is taking shape. I now have 47 bottles ranging from nice Bordeaux to cheap Asda stuff. I have 35 bottles I am happy with & it will of course evolve over time. For me most of the wine is for drinking within the next few years as I cannot really afford to spend hundreds to lay down.
Great fun and interesting learning process. I've already made plenty mistakes but happily none too expensive yet.

There is value in laying down though. I remember thinking (when I was at the around 50 bottles in the collection stage) that there's no way I'd ever be able to hang on to something for a decade or more, and buying mature wine was accessible and possible. This was only 8 years ago!

Fortunately time is a great healer, and I've since recovered from these ill thoughts. In between then and now the number flew past 300 bottles (to a number I now don't know), and I'm very grateful that I bought some things speculatively, knowing they need time. I'd strongly encourage you to stuff some age worthy kit away - I've ended up with a few now unobtainable verticals, essentially by accident, that I couldn't be more pleased to have.
 
Back again after another year. It's now three years since I first posted this thread and began to learn from you all.

My drinking levels have been about the same as in previous years, and I'm becoming increasingly sure my habit will be to take 30-40 bottles a year out of my cellar.

My thoughts on purchasing haven't changed much either. I still think that if I buy about 100 bottles a year I will soon find myself in a very good position indeed, if I am not already there. In 2018 I purchased 113 bottles at an average price of £21/bottle. For 2019 I want to buy at about the same rate, but spend a bit more on average, perhaps £25-30.

I spent a couple of months early in the year drinking only Beaujolais, out of an interest to see what it was like to focus on one region, but after that I was back to my now-comfortable pattern of interspersing new discoveries with reliable favourites.

Perhaps the most notable experience of my vinous year was going to a portfolio tasting of a wine merchant who will be well known to most reading this. Using the super-power of taking off my glasses, removing my ability to read the labels or price list, I tasted without preconception and came away with two cases of wine, one burgundy, one riesling (that's enough of a hint), that I found both spellbindingly good and fairly priced.

It's a simple thing to say, but I have found that a good way to buy wine is to taste it first and then buy it. I want to find more opportunities to do this in 2019, but I will stop short of asking this forum about which tastings are good for fear of breaching the rules on advertising. My PMs are open! Thanks again to all who provided the kind guidance upthread which set me off on this happy course.
 
Jamie - can I just say that your thread really inspired me once I'd stumbled upon the forum back in October/November. Plenty of common sense and focused enthusiasm on your part, and lots of wisdom and guidance from others - I've learned a lot. In particular, I liked the suggestions to focus more on the high and the low end (rather than have lots of bottles that are too expensive to open for no particular reason but not impressive enough for a special occasion/offline) and the caution that one's tastes will inevitably change.

In October I had about 30 miscellaneous bottles, being mainly leftovers from trips to France (notably visits to Cahors and Chablis), gifts from my father and the better end of Ocado. I knew enough to differentiate different wine styles (so I knew what they all were), but knew nothing about drinking windows, which producers are favoured, the styles of different sub-regions, which vintages to avoid - etc. I've since had the confidence to stock up to about 110 bottles in my cellar, 12 in TWS members' reserves, and 12 bought in the current round of Burgundy en primeur.

Unfortunately I don't have enough space to store more single bottles, or for a wine fridge (could probably fit a few whole cases on the floor in the cellar though), so I need to buy mainly mature bottles or wines that can be left in merchants' reserves (TWS seems to be a particularly easy way to do this). This is made harder (although more fun) by the fact that my wife likes drinking wine even more than I do (although not geeking out about it on the internet), so our consumption rate is about 2-3 bottles a week - say 125/year. I don't yet know what the average age of the bottles we drink is, but I suspect it's going to get older as I get more into this, which is going to create a storage issue if I'm to preserve reasonable choice (as wines can only be kept in offsite reserve if they're full cases). As it is, I have some older bottles (e.g. from Blast Vintners, TWS, Seckford) but the racks are mostly taken up with wines that, whilst theoretically within their drinking windows, ought probably to be saved until the early 2020s (per CT, median vintage of my wines is 2014, median drinking window is 2018-23).

Anyway, I've drunk some fantastic stuff already and here's to more enjoyment through 2019.
 
(as wines can only be kept in offsite reserve if they're full cases).

The above isn't actually true although acknowledge is more usually the norm/convention. Lay & Wheeler for one allow less than full case storage (at Vinotheque), and for bottles not bought through them, and maybe there are other firms albeit can't immediately think of one.

Disclaimer:- am a reserves storage client of L&W but no other/wider association other than that.
 
I think storage in 6-bottle cases is usually fine for warehouses if that helps, and thereafter you can withdraw by the single bottle at a time if that suits you (though always check how delivery costs work - always best to do occasional bulk deliveries, probably of cases with a mixture of your wines, rather than frequent dribs and drabs). Though TWS I think allow only a maximum of 4 different wines per a reserves case withdrawal, but of course delivery cost not then an issue.
 
Back for an update on this thread at year six. Some of you may remember my original asks for a few pointers.

I don't buy as much wine as I used to, or as much as I thought I would, but I can hardly say I go without.

I'm now into the rhythm of noticing 20 or so spare spots in the wine rack in my cellar...it's normally in the white section at the top, I drink quite a bit more white than red it turns out...and thinking 'hmm I'd better place an order'. (I don't think about the sprawl of cardboard boxes on the floor around the wine rack, they don't count.)

Then I come to this forum and look to see if there are any 'no brainer' purchases to join in with. Have had lots of success with those...couldn't see any this time around.

So then I'm off for what these days I might call 'my usuals'. Can't buy 2014s from Rully anymore so I'm onto 2017s now. The big two in this household are Schloss Lieser and Kumeu River. Kumeu River is getting steadily more expensive I see - it's £50 for Mate's vineyard by the bottle now - perhaps one day it will get expensive enough that I stop buying it. But not yet.

Haven't been to a wine tasting since pre-COVID and I seem to have dropped off everyone's lists. Need to do something about that.
 
It might have been said already (I am still trawling though the posts), but I would suggest starting a tracking system, whether Excel, some other software, or an online option such as cellartracker, at the earliest possible time and before you start purchasing in more volume. As you accumulate more and more (and more!), it will be difficult to keep an eye on supposed optimal drinking windows and so there will be an increasing risk of missing this for some bottles. I assume that cellartracker has some sort of related function; certainly excel can be set up to highlight when something is within dates that you enter.

Edit - Ah! An old thread resurrected! Oh well. I'll leave the post anyway . . .
 
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