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A thought about the "I've found a bottle" posts

(this was prompted by a discussion on a web-based bulletin board, but I thought about AFW, where these posts are fairly common)

For quite a few year I've been a participant here. It's pretty common to get queries about the value of bottles that the new poster has found (whether inherited, or discovered when renovating his basement, or whatever). Now, most of them are along the lines of "I just found a bottle of 1979 Mouton-Cadet in my grandmother's attic in Arizona, it says Rothschild on it, I want to sell it and take a trip to Hawaii! Where do I sell it? Can I get $2,000?" But sometimes there's someone with an interesting bottle (or eight). Now, most of the regulars (including me) inevitably suggest that the poster would be better off drinking than selling (we're not usually talking $1,000 plus bottles here, but things along the lines of '88 Lynch-Bages or '85 Cantemerle, possibly good but not worth big bucks). But thinking about it, is that really best advice?

Sure, I'd love it if that older bottle turned someone into a wine-lover. But frankly I don't think that serious wine drinking is for most people- you need a certain type of personality, both sensuous and analytic, to really get into wine. Someone whose interest is sparked because they found a bottle is unlikely to suddenly want to learn the differences between Pomerol and St. Julien. So maybe we'd be better off just telling them to go to winecommune, and see that someone who might appreciate it gets a chance to drink it?

I'm certainly not for encouraging speculation, flipping, etc. But in these instances it seems that this increases the supply for winedrinkers, without depriving anyone of anything. My biggest concern would be that the person who is not a wine enthusiast might have less scruples about lying about storage conditions than a geek. I'm not set on this position, it's just a thought.

As an afterthought, is there anyone here who actually found their interest in wine through finding your grandpa's '61 Chasse-Spleen? Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

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Dale Williams
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I would agree that folks who don't drink wine should probably sell those "wine finds" but for different reasons. I'm not sure that one's first expereince with wine should be an old wine. Old wine can be a bit like Scotch in that it requires some experience to acquire a taste for it. Often old Bordeaux can be quite unpalatable to a new palate.

Bi!!

Reply to
RV WRLee

"Dale Williams" in news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m04.aol.com...

Among amateur wine collectors, especially casual ones (whose bottles might be "found" after years), the problem of storage temperature is front and center. There is plenty of risk without even the issue of scruples. Many people are unconscious of the extent to which wine held for years becomes an exquisite recorder, or litmus paper, for its temperature history. In fact I have known some fairly sophisticated US collectors who rationalize away, for years, any need for temperature control (which indeed is less convenient than using natural storage facilities, whether they are truly adequate or not). The damage done by inadequate amateur storage shows up clearly enough, when you collect some bottles from a range of sources and blind-taste them.

This happened dramatically at a marathon day-long blind tasting about a year ago on the San Francisco peninsula, of privately cellared 1990s Burgundies, jointly organized by tasting groups in the region. (Allen Meadows, the US writer on Burgundies, joined us to lead the discussions.) One of the unexpected upshots was the incidence of evidently poorly stored bottles among those tasted. This was especially dramatic where people had recent experience with well-stored examples of the same wine. And these were fairly serious collectors, at least they had invested some important money into these wines.

(By the way, a good thoughtful posting, Dale.)

-- Max

Reply to
Max Hauser

Hi Max,

Indeed. While I've had some bottles (mostly Barolo,Rhone, or Bordeaux) that have survived abuse rather well, the far more common scenario is a bottle that I know from experience CAN be good being sub-par. There have been some larger offlines where we went for 2 bottles of each (2 different people bringing a bottle of the same wine), the difference can be amazing.

Frankly, I don't bother with looking at winecommune myself for this very reason. Life's too short to drink cooked wine.

And then there's what happened before the person bought it. Especially in the case of Burgundy, I only buy from a few trusted sources. That applies even to current releases- do I want to pay $40 for a bottle of Roumier Chambolle that sat in a store at 75 degrees F over the summer? In NY I buy Burgs ONLY from Rochambeau, Zachys, Sherry-Lehmann and Chambers St. (Morrell's, BWC, Acker, and the Wine Shop are probably ok, but either not convenient or cheap enough for me). I've had enough bad experiences elsewhere to stop.

All that being said, I personally have passive storage. The oldest Burgundy I currently own is '88, along with a scattering of '90s and '93s. My storage seems to be adequate for my uses, which doesn't tend to aim at keeping Burgundies or Champagnes for decades. But if I decided to sell something (to date I never have, though I have done many trades with folks familiar with my storage), I'd accept that I'd take a penalty for passive storage vs. what I might get if I had stored professionally.

best, Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

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Dale Williams

I agree that the storage conditions are one of the main concerns in buying wines - either from most retail outlets or from individuals. If anything, storage conditions before the wine has been bought at retail may be far more abusive than storage in an air conditioned home. I once had an importer tell me a horror story about how a certain distributor stored wine along with spirits in a warehouse without any temperature control in the summer. There were stories of Burgundy that arrived in southern US ports in the summer and baked on the docks so much that the corks were forced upward and stretched the foil capsule. I had a wine retailer say she would not carry wine from the mentioned distributer, even if it was the only source of the wine in the state.

The safest way to buy older wines, unless you know how the wines were stored, probably is at auction from a few of the better houses that have a reputation to consider. Most of these houses will insist on tasting samples of wine before buying it from someone unknown to them. If there is a cosiderable quantity of a single wine, they may offer a presale tasting.

However, for older wine there can be considerable bottle variation for a wine bought from one source at the same time and stored in a single cellar. I have a few wines that were bought in an unopened case soon after release up to over 30 years ago. The bottle variation for a few is not subtle, even if one excludes leaky corks and corked wines. There could be many possible reasons for this, but I could only speculate. Some bottles might barely leak in a little air, some might have just a trace of a corked problem that is too little to taste as such, but enough to make the wine seem a bit flat compared with other bottles, etc.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

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Cwdjrx _

"Dale Williams" in news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m25.aol.com...

And I don't know that your uncooled storage is uncool. My comments concerned cases where it might be so. My own experience is mainly in Northern California, which possesses many microclimates, a few of them naturally serviceable for storage. And you are 4137 km from me (as a point of potential interest, some 1.66 times the distance from Paris to Moscow of

2491 km), therefore may have different conditions.

I am not the expert on this subject but am told by generally good sources that my own micro-climate averages cellar-depth soil temperatures that, though stable, are enough warmer than, say, Western Europe's to make the difference in natural storage at soil temperature. (Those millennia of human experience with storing and aging wines in natural cellars were not in my neighborhood.)

The wine enthusiast seeking cool, stable storage has multiple practical options today even for a small collection in temporary quarters. The whole genre of wine cabinets or special-purpose refrigerators, some decorative, some utilitarian. Metropolitan areas offer commercial storage of wine in subdivided space within warehouses, and some of these services are excellent. There is always the option (I reserve this for temporary staging or trans-shipment needs) of wheeling a "Pinguino" portable air conditioner into an interior room and running the outlet hose out a door or window.

Be cool. -- Max

Reply to
Max Hauser

Perhaps not.

Most often, the wine will not be worth the small fortune the uninitiated thought it would be in the first place.

Probably the best suggestion is for the uninitiated to find a wine enthusiast and drink the bottle with the enthusiast. True enthusiasts will likely realize if the bottle is indeed valuable and guide the owner appropriately; otherwise the enthusiast will have a chance to introduce the owner to something new.

Collecting wine is like collecting Beanie Babies, with a somewhat longer horizon before worthlessness is achieved in all the rarest cases.

Dana

Reply to
Dana H. Myers

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