What Is Your Personal Wine Limit, and When/Why Do You Go There?

This seems to be a recurring, if indirect, theme of a lot of the wine related blogs posts and online articles that I have come across lately and happens to be a topic which I have pondered on several occasions, health benefits of grape juice vs wine.  First, I want you to consider your upper price point when buying wine on a regular basis.   

This would be the most expensive bottle you would consider buying on some sort of a regular basis and could be $5, $10, $20, or $50.  I will not presume to say that someone’s personal number says anything about their knowledge of or enjoyment of wine, but it does say something.  You can likely also imagine that there are people out there who think nothing of dropping $100, $150, or much much more per bottle every single time they drink wine.   

Personally, I think these types of people are missing out on everything the wine world has to offer and will never fully appreciate what they have in their glass.  Generally speaking, however, it seems to me that if you are regularly willing to spend more money on the wine than you did on the food for a meal (at home or out), then you probably have some level of interest in wine as more than a method of inebriation.   

Once you have your number in mind, now think of the absolute most you can ever see yourself spending on a single bottle.  This could be for your wedding, an anniversary, grandchild being born, end of the world, or any other event that you feel might coax your wallet open to have just the right thing for the occasion.  Also, think about the specific reason(s) why you feel spending that amount of money would provide an experience more than anything lesser could.

For some people, I have to imagine that part or most of the allure of buying that pricey special  bottle is simply the status of the thing, to be accepted by their peers or to prove how tasteful and sophisticated they are; for others, it might be something along the lines of knowing that you always have the best and are using price to guarantee that outcome.  For me though (and many other devoted oenophiles), it has to be simply curiosity.   

I think the fact that I very rarely buy a second bottle of any wine (with few exceptions) helps to drive home this approach.  In my eyes, I would rather gamble on something new and exciting (and potentially disappointing) then to play it safe and repeat a previous experience (even if delicious).  To find out which of these camps you might fall into, consider the following questions:

The last time you splurged on an expensive bottle, what did you know about it before and after the purchase?  Did you look into the history of the winery or particular region the wine was from?  Were you aware if the wine was considered a good representation of a classic style or a more experimental bottling (e.g. classic Bordeaux v.s. Super Tuscan)?

Did you order the bottle at a restaurant with friends or did you drink it at home with your significant other?  Did you display the bottle on your mantle or post pictures of it on Facebook until it was consumed?

Did you purchase the bottle, without any knowledge of the style or producer, because a critic gave the wine 98 points?  Was the bottle the most expensive offering from the winery?  Did you see a celebrity endorse or drink that particular wine on t.v. (or mention it in a rap song)?

So I’m being rather blatant here, but if you answered yes to anything in the first round of questions, you are probably the curious type like me.  If you align more with the second group of questions, you probably have at least some part of you looking to impress other and declare your sophistication.  If you fall into the last category, you want to be confident that what you are drinking is the creme de la creme.  Chances are that you might answer yes to portions of each grouping, and that is certainly allowed, nothing is ever that black and white.  

I think it is good to  think about your motivations though, in many aspects of life.  I would be curious to know how the upper limit prices I asked you to think about above differ if grouped by motivation; whether status folks or the curious spend more.  I certainly find that over the years, I have climbed the ladder so to say in that my upper price is probably quite a bit higher than it used to be.  I guess that bodes well for the quality and value of wines I have tried.

And with that, I will apologize for the therapy session and give you two interesting tidbits:

-I passed my Society of Wine Educators CSW exam!  I’ll be adding it to my business card. . . (psst. . -I work as an Engineer for an HVAC design company)

-A friend left me with a wax topped bottle of home-brewed Imperial IPA to cellar for a while and see what happened (that was over a year ago); I recently found that same bottle had blown open from my wine rack and spewed beer and wax all over my basement. . . how fun.  I suppose I should drink what is left in the bottle.