(Gerhard Retter / Editorial team / animated pic: © Manfred Klimek – runwayml)
Here it comes fluttering in, an email from a well-known chef who is retiring after four decades. Grand house, grand name, grand life. Attached: a meticulously maintained Excel spreadsheet of his wine cellar. Plenty of Bordeaux. Plenty of Burgundy. Old vintages. Big names. And immediately the same question that almost every serious wine person eventually asks: what to do with it?
And more importantly: what is this stuff actually worth?
Because when it comes to wine, whole continents often lie between cellar fantasy and market reality. Very many people automatically regard their bottles as small fortunes. The market is usually considerably more sober. Only the absolute pinnacle of the world remains genuinely expensive, genuinely liquid and genuinely sought-after: a small elite of cult wines, those three or four handfuls of estates that have long been traded like blue-chip stocks. DRC, Lafleur, Leroy, Roumier, perhaps a few other names. There, demand, myth and price speculation still align. And that will remain the case – regardless of where crises are heading.
The rest? The other wines? It gets more difficult.
Because wine has a devious quality: it constantly multiplies. Hardly have you convinced yourself that you have enough when the next vintage of the century comes round the corner. And of course, you must not miss that one. Never. So you keep buying. Often also because over the years you have had to ‘trade up’ simply to gain access to the coveted allocations in the first place. Two cases of solid Premier Crus, so that perhaps one day you might be allocated a bottle of the icon.
That is how the cellar grows. And grows. And grows.
At some point, you find yourself standing between shelves full of grand intentions and start doing the maths. Extrapolated against average life expectancy, liver function and drinking frequency, it quickly becomes clear: all of this can never be consumed. Especially as most cellars do not consist of legends at all, but of ‘merely’ good wines. Very good, perhaps. But not those bottles that set auction houses around the world into a frenzy. The market for them is brutally honest. Many mature wines barely interest anyone outside small circles of enthusiasts. Particularly not when provenance, storage or vintage have not been documented with absolute perfection.
That sounds sobering. It is.
Because most people do not actually collect wine for investment reasons. But out of longing. Anticipation. Love of a flavour, a vintage, an experience. At some point, the cellar becomes a biography in bottles. Each row tells the story of a phase of life. That is precisely why opening them so often feels difficult.
The famous ‘special occasion’ is constantly pushed further into the future. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Christmas. At some point, you keep the bottle for so long that it slowly starts to turn against you. Over-aged. Oxidised. Tired. Once-great wines then end up as sad culinary philosophy somewhere between Kalte Ente and Feuerzangenbowle.
You see this particularly mercilessly with sweet wines. They probably lead the worldwide statistics for un drunk fine wines. Sauternes, Tokaji, Trockenbeerenauslesen – legendary wines with enormous ageing potential, often left untouched for decades like museum relics. Yet many young sweet wines are sensational: vibrant, fresh, full of fruit and energy. Instead, they wait in the darkness for a fireside evening that never happens.
This is precisely where one of the great misconceptions of many collectors lies. Wine is not a painting. It wants to die. That is exactly what it was made for.
Of course, there are technical discussions about optimal maturity, drinking windows and development curves. By now, every cellar app in the world tells you in a panic which bottle is ‘ready to drink’ and which is close to collapse. Most of the time, it grossly exaggerates. Good cellar conditions can easily give many wines an additional ten or fifteen years. And yet one truth remains: the sommelier’s task has always been to bring the wine into the glass as close as possible to its peak. Not to mummify it.
That is why it is perfectly legitimate sometimes to drink great wines too young. Good decanting helps. Air helps. Patience in the glass helps. Above all, it helps to understand that wine does not possess a fixed perfection, but different phases of life. Some move you when young, others when mature, some do both. In restaurants, this is often understood better than at home. There, the cellar is constantly in motion. Wines find their dishes, their guests, their moments. Even slightly tired bottles can suddenly blossom once more when the food, mood and company are right.
At home, by contrast, the cellar often becomes a mausoleum of one’s own expectations.
So perhaps the most important insight of all: do not buy wine for your own funeral feast. Open the bottles. Share them. Drink them with friends, children, lovers, colleagues, neighbours. The greatest mistake many collectors make is waiting for the perfect moment. The perfect moment almost always comes into being through the opening itself.
And one more thing: anyone who genuinely loves wine should start letting the next generation drink along too. Not as a missionary. Not in a hectoring way. But as a matter of course. Good bottles do not belong only in climate-controlled cellars, but on tables. Because that is where they come alive. Or, to put it somewhat more philosophically: Sapere aude, as Kant wrote. Have the courage to use your own understanding.
This also applies to the controlled building up and running down of one’s own wine cellar.
(This text also appeared in a different version in the magazine ‘Feinschmecker’)