Speeding Up Your Wine Education
You like getting good deals on interesting, hard to find wines. Good.
Do this:
1. go to: http://www.winebid.com
2. Click on the "advanced search" in the upper left hand corner
3. Make the maximum price $25
4. Choose "United States".
5. Click "Search."
…………………..Cool, eh?
What you are looking at is the perfect way to taste through past vintages at a reasonable price and see for yourself what age does to California wine. You’ve got lots to choose from at this wine education bazaar:
1999 Carneros Merlot
1886 Sonoma Caberent Sauvignon
1997 Santa Cruz Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon
1990 Mountain Grown Napa Chardonnay
1996 Anderson Valley Pinot Noir
1994 Sonoma County Sparkling Wine
It goes on and on up to over 200 lots of older and newer CA wines all at a bid of currently at $20 or less. You can do the same search for French, Italian, Australian or any other country’s wines.
I used to work at Winebid.com. It was for about a year or so at its beginnings. I was in marketing. And though I’d worked in wine for nearly a decade at that point, rarely had I had the opportunity see, let alone taste, many of the top wines I’d read about all those years. So, when I would go out into the Winebid warehouse and be confronted with great and interesting wines sitting in boxes all over the floor and on shelves of this temperature controlled building, I never failed to be stopped in my tracks. Basically, you droll. There’s no other way to describe it. All top auction houses have this embarrassment of riches in their storage areas. And I’d be willing to bet that those who work in the auction business never get tired of being around these gems and curiosities.
But the great thing about a market like Winebid.com, Winecommune.com and the brick and mortar auction houses is the access they give us to things you simply don’t see outside your cellar. Most of this stuff is on very few shelves around the country. But at the auction house, it’s basically all they got.
But what you have at Winebid.com is the chance to buy single bottles of older wines. Your aren’t forced to buy entire lots of various bottles that would price you out of the market. Winebid allows you to spend $40 or whatever for a couple interesting wines, pay the shipping, and boom….2 bottles of 1995 Sonoma Valley Cab land at your door.
Spend some of your monthly wine budget on this sort of thing. Buy the occasional 10 year old wine or 15 year old wine and risk the money on your education. It might not be a great tasting wine though. In fact, you may end up dumping it. But, you are more like to get your hands on an aged bottle of something that most wine drinkers never indulge in until they’ve been buying and storing wine for eight years or so. Think of buying older "value wines" as a way to soup up your wine education and move ahead faster.
The Young Wine Drinker’s Conundrum
Back when I was just getting started in my own self-education in the world of wine, I had the problems that many young wine drinkers have: I didn’t have much money, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Actually, I was very aware of my lack of knowledg…
Great post Tom! This is an opportunity that is indeed a huge boon for young wine drinkers or those who are just beginning their wine education.
One of the things that is important to mention, though, are the risks of buying at auction: spoiled wine that most of the time can’t be returned. Even with those dangers, however, this is a viable and valuable way to learn what happens to wine in a bottle over time, something that most people only learn much later in their wine drinking lives.
that is a great post.
Balthazar
Hookah Shisha
Speeding Up Your Wine Education
[Source: FERMENTATIONS: The Daily Wine Blog] quoted: And though I’d worked in wine for nearly a decade at that point, rarely had I had the opportunity see, let alone taste, many of the top wines I’d read about all those years. So, when I would go out i…