As first world problems go, this one is a cracker: owning too much wine, more than you can ever hope to drink. As one avid Hong Kong-based wine collector puts it, ‘Like many things in life, you know you need to deal with it, but you don’t have to right this minute, so the problem goes on growing, which increases the reluctance to address it!’
The collecting instinct is certainly strong and the case studies outlined below may strike a chord with collectors of all stripes. They do with me.
Lawyer Ian Mill KC has that instinct in spades but has profited enormously from it. Bidding closed yesterday at Christie’s online on a second tranche of his collection, including some serious burgundy. ‘When I started buying in the ’90s, it was all about consumption and sharing. It became a collection when I started viewing wine as an investment opportunity in the mid ’00s. Since then, disposal of part of my collection has been an ongoing inevitability, since I appear to be unable to stop buying, but my focus now is exclusively on finding great bottles of mature wine to share with friends.’
But few of those I spoke to were keen on selling. My North London friend with the best cellar I know muses on what became a habit: ‘I first became interested in wine in 1983. The 1982 clarets were on sale en primeur. I still have a copy of the opening offer from Bibendum (my nearest fine-wine store). Gruaud Larose £63 a case, Lynch-Bages £75, Beychevelle £80, Cheval Blanc £260. It seems scarcely credible. And this was when, for the first time in my life, I had some surplus cash. I bought enthusiastically, but also more or less blind – obviously, I’d never tasted older vintages of these wines. But that didn’t matter. I was buying future pleasure – a strange concept when you think of it. I certainly wasn’t buying as an investment. And I found all of the process alluring – the fragrant wood (and not-so-fragrant cardboard), the labels, the wording on the labels, the “certified invoices”, the idea of some of your wine being in Bordeaux, then being shipped, and so on. Also, the slow formation of your own taste.
‘I certainly never calculated how much I would need to last me the rest of my life – how many years that would be, and how many units per week. And I’ve never met a wine-lover who thought about it in this way. In one part of our brains, most wine-lovers believe in their own immortality. (Related to this, the only benefit of the years passing more quickly as you age is that your wine is doing the same, and turns out to be readier to drink than you imagine).
‘At first I had a small underground cellar in my house, so most of my wine was stored in Corsham, and with merchants. Then I built a bigger cellar, but paradoxically didn’t take much of my wine out of storage. And I carried on buying. I dreamed of future dinners – at the millennium, for example – but somehow never activated them when the time came. I bought wine from my friends’ birth years, from my wedding year, and so on. I started going to auctions, and meeting wine merchants – a companionable, if still largely male, crew on the whole.
‘Obviously, I made mistakes, especially when I followed the advice of wine writers with different palates. I bought a lot of Cornas in the 1980s without knowing that when I opened a bottle of it I would find it – well, “rustic” is putting it kindly. I got rid of the lot.
‘Occasionally, over the last 20 years or so, I have sold wine – usually when the price seemed to have gone so high that I felt it would be foolish to actually drink it. I sold a case of 1983 Le Pin; later, a half-case of 1982 Lafite at the peak of its usage in China as a form of currency (the merchant I sold it to also came back and paid £50 for the wooden case the bottles were in). But somehow this was anomalous behaviour; it didn’t encourage me to take a rational approach to my cellar and sell off some of my ageing bottles and cases.
‘I tell myself that my cellar is like a deposit or investment account, something to draw on when I need a major operation, or a family member needs bailing out. The fact that this hasn’t yet happened doesn’t mean that it won’t.
‘As you age, two things happen: (1) a degree of rationality breaks in, as you realise that buying en primeur clarets whose maturity you will never live to enjoy is, frankly, bonkers; and (2) your palate changes, for both food and wine. You eat less meat, for instance, so those gutsy, whopping reds are less called for. And if you are watching television with supper you probably don’t want to think too much about what you’re drinking. Nowadays, the only wine shop I visit is inside Waitrose, for good red Côtes du Rhône, Argentinian Chardonnay, and so on. I still enjoy buying wine, almost as much as I did 40 and more years ago.
‘Do I have any advice? Locate your palate, identify where each sort of wine sits on the pleasure/price continuum. (You will probably enjoy a good medium-priced champagne considerably more than a cheapo fizz, but do those monster-priced premium champagnes really give you twice/five times the pleasure? Almost certainly not.) Enjoy your mistakes, in buying and in blind-tasting. Also, when drinking, try to be as cost-blind and current-value-blind as possible. Money-thoughts will mess with your head. Try not to think of Parker-points or Broadbent stars. It’s just you, the wine, and the glass. It’s more enjoyable that way, I promise.
‘PS I see I still have a case of 1985 Barjac Cornas in storage. Any offers?’
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