Counting Your Wine Blessings

Published on Friday, February 15, 2008, by Daniel Duane / Edit Post

I recently started using Vinfolio. It’s one of these online cellar inventory services, and a very good one. You create an account and then enter every bottle you own. When you’re done, the program gives you different ways to search and organize the information, and it lets you see the distribution of your collection in terms of region, varietal, color, style, even (for heaven’s sake!) 100-point score. It’s free; Vinfolio makes money from advertising, various add-on services, and by connecting you to its own wine store, so that any time you run out of a bottle, or notice a hole in your collection, you can solve the problem with a click of the mouse. It has also set up a kind of buyback function, in which you can sell it wine from your collection. For more serious collectors—meaning the kind with real money—Vinfolio will even warehouse your wine and allow you to call up bottles for delivery through your online account.

I’ve never been the collecting type myself. No classic R&B vinyl, no postage stamps, no bronze statues of cowboys. And I certainly don’t have the pocketbook for ambitious wine collecting—it’s an awfully expensive game—but something about wine does make me want to keep a variety of it around, so that I can grab a good bottle for any dinner, any night. I guess I’m also susceptible to the romantic vision of the small wine cellar, the secret room where you hide your treasures—although in my case it’s just a corner of my cluttered basement, where the climate is pretty stable. I also like the way the nurturing of this little horde seems to be changing my buying habits. Instead of picking up bottles to drink in the next few days, I pick up bottles to replace ones I’ve consumed, and to flesh out areas where I’m lacking. It’s almost as if it has become the wine list for the modest restaurant that is my home, and I try to keep everything in stock.

But I’m also noticing, through my interaction with Vinfolio, some real pitfalls—of the spiritual variety. The software keeps a constant dollar-value tally of your entire collection, in terms of both current auction prices and retail replacement cost. It also tracks the change in value over time, so you can see if your wine is depreciating or appreciating. I don’t have any of the wines that these functions are built to celebrate, but I still notice myself glancing at those dollar figures and, because I’m human, wishing they were higher. These thoughts are quickly followed, of course, by thoughts about the absurdity of those thoughts, but still: I don’t like the notion of my little wine cellar becoming a kind of stock portfolio, a place to look at numbers and rub my hands together, as if counting gold (or tin) coins down in some lonely, greedy dungeon. Not much risk of that, I suppose, but the very thought of it has forced me to ask what I do want that collection to be about, and what I want wine to be about, period, vis-à-vis the rest of my life. And I guess the answer is just pleasure, of the simple kind.

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POST A COMMENT |5 Comments

COMMENT

  • "But the 2005 vintage is selling now nearly $5000 in the US, according to wine-searcher.com."

    Wretched excess.

  • The $10 I spent then was definitely $10 and not $50. But -- bear with me for a moment -- think about this:

    1970 Taylor Fladgate Vintage Porto sold for $12 when I bought it in 1975. According to the "inflation calculator" at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis -- http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/research/data/us/calc/ -- that would be equal to spending $48.09 in today's money. OK, but the 2003...+READ

    The $10 I spent then was definitely $10 and not $50. But -- bear with me for a moment -- think about this:

    1970 Taylor Fladgate Vintage Porto sold for $12 when I bought it in 1975. According to the "inflation calculator" at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis -- http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/research/data/us/calc/ -- that would be equal to spending $48.09 in today's money. OK, but the 2003 vintage of Taylor Fladgate runs between (approx.) $75-100, according to wine-searcher.com, and the 1970 vintage can be purchased today for $249.99 at K&L.

    When I open a bottle, do I think of its current $250 value, its $75 replacement value, or that I paid $12?

    When the 1970 Beaulieu Vineyards Georges de Latour Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon was first released, it was $8.00 ($41.26 in today's dollars). The 2002 carries a winery suggested retail, however, of $95.00;, while the 1970 can be purchased today for $200 or so.

    1970 Château Lynch-Bages was $5.95 when it was released -- we're talking retail price; not futures -- which would be $26.02 in today's money. The 2005 vintage? It's between $85 and $125 on futures, depending upon where you buy it. And the 1970? It sells for approximately $225-255 here in the US.

    I purchased 1971 Château Pétrus upon its release in 1974 for $19.95. That would equal $87.25 in 2008 (and the $20 price tag was much easier to afford then than any $80-90 is now!). But the 2005 vintage is selling now nearly $5000 in the US, according to wine-searcher.com. The 1971 today is approximately $1500. Now ignoring which wine today may be the better value, I cannot imagine opening up EITHER bottle at today's prices.

    Cheers,
    Jason-COLLAPSE

  • Here's a question for you, Jason: did ten dollars feel like ten dollars when you paid it? Or did it feel like fifty? That's a real question, by the way, not a way of fishing for a particular answer. I honestly want to know. I guess what I'm wondering is to what degree those moves are still available--buying age-worthy wines at a reasonable price, when they're still young--and to what degree...+READ

    Here's a question for you, Jason: did ten dollars feel like ten dollars when you paid it? Or did it feel like fifty? That's a real question, by the way, not a way of fishing for a particular answer. I honestly want to know. I guess what I'm wondering is to what degree those moves are still available--buying age-worthy wines at a reasonable price, when they're still young--and to what degree they've been changed by wine's status as a luxury/investment/status product. I've been asking around in wine shops, and reading around, and getting varied answers. I do get the sense that '05 Bordeaux is a good enough vintage that even some of the wines further down the classification scale (and thus price scale) would make sense to keep in that way.

    I guess I'm asking for personal reasons: I'm finding that I love the softer subtleties of wine that's been around a while, and I'd love my own wine collection to operate the way you've just described your own, and I'm wondering what it's going to take.
    -Dan-COLLAPSE

  • I hate this sort of software. Wine IS about pleasure, about enjoyment (not investment). But sadly, this too has now changed.

    Part of the enjoyment -- at least for me -- is going to the cellar and pulling out a bottle that I purchased in its raw youth and is now in (hopefully) its mature prime. But what is the wine worth when you bought it long ago but open it today? Can you really afford to open...+READ

    I hate this sort of software. Wine IS about pleasure, about enjoyment (not investment). But sadly, this too has now changed.

    Part of the enjoyment -- at least for me -- is going to the cellar and pulling out a bottle that I purchased in its raw youth and is now in (hopefully) its mature prime. But what is the wine worth when you bought it long ago but open it today? Can you really afford to open up a $200 bottle with dinner on a casual Tuesday night? Can you afford to light a match to two Ben Franklin's?

    I don't know about you, but I can't. On the other hand, I can afford to go down to the cellar and grab a bottle I bought years ago for $10 . . .

    For me, the wine is worth what I paid for it. No more, no less. Wine is meant for drinking, not for investing.

    But that's me. YMMV.-COLLAPSE

  • I use Cellar Tracker (www.cellartracker.com) to keep track of my wine. I like the community aspect of it, looking at the comments and tasting notes of other members. I can keep track of value as well, but I mostly use it to see what other people think of the wine that I have and see if I learn something new :)