La Cave

"There is a devil in every berry of the grape"  - The Qur'an

Cellaring wine is a great hobby.  It frees you from the whims of stocking levels at wine shops or grocery stores, allows you to lay down wines when young (and inexpensive) and enjoy them in their age, and is an insanely difficult equation to optimize.  There are many multi-variable equations in life, but wine collecting has got to be one of the more complicated ones I've come across.

For starters, Wine is a living thing.  You can take a great vineyard, and vines that have produced fabulous wine over the centuries, and a freak rainstorm or heatwave will render this year's production worthless to all but vinegar producers.  Winemakers are a fickle breed as well, constantly tinkering with their post-harvest techniques in order to pander to the palette of this or that wine critic.  Then you have the problem of provenance.....what happened to the wine after the winemaker bottled it?  Did it sit in a nice cold, humid cave somewhere, or in the hot backroom of some wine shop, getting slowly cooked?  How was it shipped.....air conditioned and dark, or in the back of someone's pickup truck in the Arizona sun?

And that's just one bottle!  Last month I was looking forward to a tasting of wines from Saint Estèphe, a sub-appellation within Bordeaux.  One bottle in particular, a 1986 Chateau Cos D'Estornel, was at the top of my list to try, after a life-changing glass of the wine in 2004.  The wine-tasting night arrived, the blind tasting commenced, and I didn't find the spice box of Cos among the glasses.  There were some amazing wines, and some horrid ones, but the elusive chimera of Cos was nowhere to be found. 

Imagine my surprise when the blind tasting was exposed, and the unanimous vote for most noxious glass of wine at our table turned out to be the 1986 Cos.  Two tables over....and a different bottle.....was a completely different result.  I smelled their glass, then my own.  No question, two different wines.  They were both 1986 Cos', but there was a world of difference in the bottles.  There is an old cliche among wine drinkers, "There are no good wines, only good bottles".  Now I know how a cliche becomes a cliche.

So, this is the raw product you are dealing with....a variable bottle of wine that may or may not be as excellent as expected.

The next exponent in complexity is the fact that there are numerous wines that pair well with the food you are enjoying them with.  A friend and I spent five minutes on the phone debating a dozen different potential wine pairings for a dish my wife was cooking the other evening.  It's not as simple as red with meat and white with fish....if you have a nice subtle dish and pair it with a Zinfandel, Syrah, or 'hot' (high alcohol) Cabernet, you can completely obscure the flavor of the food.  At the same time, if you grab a Bandol from Southern France with some bbq ribs off the grill, you'll realize they both gain something by being enjoyed together.  Ever had Champagne with Strawberries?  Cabernet with dark chocolate?  Nuff said.

So, you have to lay down wines from all over the world, because you need a diverse palette of choices from which to pair the meal you are preparing.  But wait, wine continues to change and evolve over time, so the Bandol that worked with those ribs in 1996 may be a more subtle, nuanced grand dame now and be completely pummeled by your coca-cola/mustard treatment on the ribs.  It's a moving target, each bottle, on how it is aging.  Some wines age well, some not so much.  Not all wines are built to last.

Lets take stock of where we are so far: you have bottles that you hope are going to be good wines, from all over the world, that you hope have good provenance, that are aging at different rates.  You are presumably drinking some of your inventory, so the wines are being depleted, and restocked with either the same/similar wines in subsequent vintages (if those vintages were viable and not ruined by mother nature, fungus, or poor winemaking).  Some wines pair better with foods prepared in different seasons, so you are not uniformly depleting your wines, but rather seasonally depleting them.

Wine harvest times do not change significantly from year to year, so the offering window of new vintages is somewhat predictable.  If you suspect that the 2000 Chateau Lynch-Bages you cellared in 2002 is getting ready to enjoy with that lamb tonight, you make a mental note to purchase some more Lynch-Bages futures (a contract to buy the wine pre-bottling but post-harvest) of this year's vintage so you can enjoy your lamb with a fine Bordeaux in 2018 as well.

That would make things simple if all wines had the same maturity windows, but they do not. You end up separating your cellar into short-term (aka 'daily drinkers'), medium-term, and long-term bottles.  Your long term bottles eventually move towards 'ready to drink' over the years and as you lay down more long-term bottles.  You end up with a mix of wines that are in their maturity window from which to pair from, and that mix is obviously larger if you have a big cellar.

This is why it's is so devilishly difficult to start a wine cellar, or cave.  You need to purchase long-term drinkers that are sacrosanct for the foreseeable future, pay dearly for the same bottles of older vintages so you dont have to wait 10 years or more to drink any wine, and then some bottles with shorter maturity windows to drink with dinner this year.  You need to mix up the vintages, regions, varietals, so you have enough of a short-term palette from which to pair from.

The final variable in this insane equation is the consumer of the wine.  A wine that tastes great to one person is nasty plonk to the person next to them.  I once went to a wine tasting in North Carolina with some friends, that was hosted by the Riedel wine glass company.  They had us drink the same wines out of different glasses, with drastically different results.  One of my friends went home and promptly poured their favorite daily-drinker into the new expensive wine glasses they had purchased......and spit it out.  It tasted horrible when tasted out of the new stemware.  This was the same person, not even a different person!

The human nose is the primary organ of taste in our body, with the taste buds in our tongues communicating only sweet/sour/bitter/salt.  The rest of the pleasure of tasting food and wine is thanks to two small odor detecting patches high up in the nasal passages, made up of 5-6 million yellowish cells. (A dog has about 200 million, for contrast).  We are not bloodhounds.  We are not even bunny rabbits in the batting average of smell sensitivity.

Having said that, there are people who can taste a glass of wine and tell you the grape varietal, region, producer, and vintage within a scary margin.  There are others who will tell you 'red or white'.  When you wander down to your wine cellar, and are considering which of your 750ml children to uncork, you must consider the tastes of the people appreciating the wine with you.  If it is just you and your spouse, you may choose one bottle.  If you have wine-afficionado friends coming over, you may choose other bottles (and the converse is true as well). 

You can see the complexity involved, not to mention expense.  Add to the equation the periodic large-party where you have to open up bottles of multiple varieties to appease the tastes of your guests, or donating bottles/cases of wine to charity auctions (nine bottles of which I will be pouring this Friday night for the local Opera company).  You have episodic demand and supply of a chemically dynamic substance.

Oh, and you are generally making decisions about how to stock your cellar after you've tasted a glass or bottles of some wine, and have imparied decision-making faculties.  That always helps.  This is otherwise known as the wine equivalent of the 'Hawaiian shirt in the closet'. It looked calm and tasteful on the shelf in Maui, but when you get it amongst your shirts in the closet, it stands out like a klieg light.  The same is true of that fantastic case of wine you picked up on your Greek vacation, which tastes remarkably similar to nail-polish-remover when you uncork a bottle a few months later at home.

When I originally moved into this house in 2003, I purchased a wine cellar system (self contained, temperature controlled, racks, etc.) and promptly loaded it up over two years with nearly 900 bottles.  Unfortunately, they were nearly all within a five year vintage spread, which meant that there were fewer long-term bottles than I needed, too many daily-drinkers, etc.  Wine collecting takes time and patience and strategy, and I didn't have as much as I thought I had in 2003/2004.  

I have been very busy the last five years. I haven't had a chance to replenish the cellar as often as required, and have been prolific in my donations to charities.  I am now below 200 bottles, and it seems a good time to revisit the strategy behind wine collecting for the gradual restocking of the cellar.  My tastes have also changed as I have aged, preferring different wines than I picked in 2003.

I'm going to head out and talk with some friends, wine merchants, and other collectors, and get their strategies for cellaring.  If you have any magic solutions to solve this puzzle, I'd love to hear them.

Comments

[Mark Davis]

I have done the same thing Christian but with a slightly different twist- I bought a particular style of wine because I simply loved them. Still do! But I now have to ease off of them for medical reasons! I collected sweet wines/dessert wines like the Sauternes, Ports, Hungarian Tokaji, German Eisweins etc for years. The top name producers, the great vintages, well maintained and in a variety of sub-styles and countries of origin but now sadly in the process of having to sell them off to replenish with those wines not so high in residual sugars. (I am keeping all of the Château d'Yquem!)

[Christian]

And Mark, you know I am there for you, and will be happy to buy up your 'stickies' collection just to contribute to your good health! That's me, a team player.....