Well it's New Year's Eve - ending 2021 and ready for 2022. In November I finally accomplished something that was almost thirty years in the making - my wine cellar was completely filled. I have four storage lockers (each one holds approximately 300 bottles of wine) in a temperature controlled facility here in Fort Worth (unsolicited plug for Classic Wine Storage). Having reached the ripening red wine age of 54, I decided that the solution to my problem was not adding more storage (ie another locker) but rather to start drinking all these bottles before I die. Neither of my two sons (ages 21 and 17) currently show any interest in good wine, and my wife, while occasionally sharing a glass with me, prefers champagne or a good martini or scotch. So I have decided to drink these 1200 bottles of wine (plus any others I may acquire or receive in the future) over the next ten years. So that's roughly 120 bottles a year or one every three days. Now mind you I can easily polish off a whole bottle while at home watching football or some other sporting event over the course of five to eight hours. But to systematically consume one bottle every three days would be about two glasses a night (or applying Aggie math - that's six glasses of wine per bottle). Probably not ideal for my liver or claiming I am not an alcoholic, but nonetheless it seems like a fun quest. And while I have also never blogged or even tweeted much in my life (I currently have a whopping 34 followers on twitter under my @silicondevil handle) it makes sense to me to track this on a blog rather than writing a diary or some other old-school method (being the accountant that I am, I must admit an excel spreadsheet did come to mind). Not sure if anyone will read this, but at a min I'll have a daily record of what I drank and whether I liked it, and any other things I want to write about that day.
I would guess all the wine I own I purchased myself (with my wife) through club memberships or while visiting the winery. I am not a wine snoot. I don't have a great palate or nose. I like good wine, but realize there is a price range where it doesn't make sense to spend more (is a $1,000 bottle really that much better than a $250 bottle) or spend less (there will be no Kirkland or Trade Joe bottles in this cellar though both make very affordable good tasting wine). I also have a natural bias toward northern California wine having lived there from 1993-2004 (we lived in Monterey and San Jose during that period). Right now I only have a few bottles prior to the 2000 vintage as I have consumed almost everything I have bought from 1993-1999 (my early days of wine drinking and prior to having kids).
I think my unofficial rating system will be simple - f'ing great, very good, ok or I dumped it out (spoiled/corked or just tastes like shit). I'll start tomorrow - January 1, 2022 and hope to end by December 31, 2031 although realistically I'll buy more wine between now and then so this may take longer than ten years.
Cheers, Chris