I’m out to convince you not to build a wine collection. It is a terrible idea.
The reasons are myriad, but let me have a go at a few.
Firstly, convincing you to buy wine is big business. Unlike other more overt assets, where the pitch might be “you are greedy and want money for doing nothing – buy crypto!”, the wine sales pitch is clever and insidious. It is romanticised (cue picture of group of smiling friends sitting outside at dusk, glasses gleaming in the sunset colours) and amateur poetic, with the journos pushing the florid hyperboles not only out into the stream but fully over the waterfall. It cleverly associates you with sophistication. And if you have even a hint of an addictive personality, you are sunk – soon you will be reading reviews in wine dealer emails of wines you cannot possibly miss.
Every wine is Parker X points, Wine Advocate Y points, Platter’s 5 stars, and has a Master of Wine for hire or said amateur poet telling you this wine streamed its crystalline way from the underside of a unicorn and its like will never be seen again. The scarcity card will be played on you: strictly on allocation, only 1 000 bottles produced, and on and on. But of course, next week something equally amazing will have dribbled out of the unicorn.
You will never stop buying, and you will buy too much.
Secondly, if you buy it for pleasure, you will almost certainly not store it properly. This is not a myth: wine is incredibly grumpy about storage. A little variation on a young wine – okay, but the more a wine costs, the longer you will store it and the more important it is to have it in perfect condition. Wines only taste magical when they are stored perfectly. I’m not talking about wines being fully “off”, just a bit off colour. You may not even realise it, but you will be wondering why that special wine didn’t taste that special. The dark cupboard, the cool room at the back… None of that is good enough. The rack on the kitchen counter, well, ja.
If you buy it for investment, then you have two problems.
Firstly, storage. The moment you take investment wine out of professional storage, it devalues (because maybe it was on your kitchen counter). You need the chain of provenance like it’s CSI: The Wine Murders. So that’s expensive, and also tough when you really feel like a glass of Cheval Blanc with your boerewors on a Saturday night, and it’s under the ground a hundred kms away.
The other problem is that you are almost certainly going to lose money. You are up against professional investors who know the market better, can source more cheaply, and get first dibs on the things that return well, and you will be selling into a declining wine market, where values have been suppressed for years. Plus the storage costs. Also, wholesale swings in consumer preference can skewer you if you are holding for the long term. Ask me and my hundreds of bottles of Bordeaux that are now as on trend as pineapple and cheese sticks.
But the biggest issue is age. No, not just the wine, I mean you. A wine collection is all about these special wines that you keep. And keep. If you get into First Growth Bordeaux or Grand Cru Burgundy, you will be told to get out your iPhone and set the alarm for about thirty years. Even with good Cape wines, you are starting to see a shift in drinking windows from 3-5 years to 20+. When you add these years to the age when you can afford to start buying the good stuff, you normally arrive at age N in the equation N = c+T, where c is a constant and T is the age when your teeth fall out.
I jest, but it really is a serious point. I invested in a lot of wines, with the idea that cases I would sell (at a profit, of course) of a particular wine would pay for the one case I would keep and drink. Aside from the profit point being largely wrong, it is now clear that there is no way in my life I can drink a case of each wine I have. The bottle my wife and I used to share, before opening a second bottle, has become the glass she has and me feeling groggy the next day, trying to do my duty by at least removing one bottle from the total. 90% of my friends have become "lightweights", meaning the line-up I would plan for a dinner has become a lonely bottle and maybe a glass by Coravin. The unicorn is crossing its knees.
The result is wine fridges so full I can’t see what’s in them – a carefully curated wine evening now usually means one of the first three bottles I can pull out. And sadly, bottles going well past their prime. Wines that meant so much when I forked out for them, I now force on people at braais in the hope that someone might at least enjoy them.
The worst is the wine room. Now I know it sounds pompous, but hear me out. I’ve been collecting wine for 40 years and having my own temperature-controlled, beautifully LED-lit, shelved room has always been a dream, so I finally decided to reward myself in our home. It is now time to put a few hundred bottles in it. Thanks to our renovation being Saw 13: The Building Project, five years have passed since the wine room plan was hatched. In those five years, the consumption changes I described have occurred. You see the problem. I now not only have to worry about age N, when the wines will be ready, but also age D, when I will have got through all the wines at the current rate of consumption. Readers of such a fine newsletter will not need D explained to them.
So, store 12 bottles of things you will drink soon. If you have a taste for mature wine, my condolences: pay to buy them mature and don’t try to get them there yourself. And in all cases, don’t save anything for the right occasion or for the right guests or for a rainy day. You’re alive, life is beautiful, it deserves good wine. Just drink!
You and the unicorn deserve it.