What wines will create memorable moments in your life tomorrow?
We’re not talking about the bottles in your Eurocave at home that you’ll enjoy next week, next month, or even throughout 2024. We’re talking about the bottles you will serve at your daughter’s wedding, your son’s 30th birthday, anniversaries, Christmases, retirement parties in decades to come. Perhaps for most, this is not a normal point of reference. “We’ll just buy what we need when the time comes”, we might think to ourselves. But what if you can’t? What if, in 20 years, the wines we really want, that fit with our lifestyle, are gone – consumed by younger drinkers who lack the patience to preserve bottles into their peak, or deteriorated – traded around the world by investors out for a quick buck, with no regard for the quality of logistics required to preserve these precious bottles properly.
Call us dramatic, even overly sentimental, but we don’t want to risk it. Monetary value aside, each bottle in a collection encapsulates a future moment of happiness – something for which we won’t cut corners; not for ourselves, and not for our clients.
Collecting with a level head
When building a fine wine collection, we necessarily look forwards, planning for the future we hope to experience, accompanied by wines that will be at their apogee in 10, 20, 30+ years. Depending on our collecting objectives, some wines in our collection may not even be consumed by us – they might be destined for our children or grandchildren. With this in mind, a collection logic that is based on our future selves and situations (rather than our current state of mind) is essential.
Throughout our lives, tastes and collecting, objectives may change. We advocate strongly for factoring these changes into the build of a 1275 collection, allowing for all eventualities, be it the worst case scenario (I can’t drink as much as I used to, I need to liquidate my wine assets, my children don’t want to drink the wine I’ll leave them), or the ideal dream (I’m healthy and continue to enjoy wine, I will drink most of my collection, I will leave a meaningful parcel to my children). Concretely, this means considering characteristics such as age worthiness, alcohol content, the volume of wines in a collection vs. their value per bottle, the appropriate serving formats etc.
This long-term, forward-planning exercise (on a matter that is usually dealt within the moment) does not necessarily come naturally. Our role as advisors is therefore to encourage our collectors to consider their end goal, and plan for this. And while we’re always happy to share our knowledge with clients and friends on the wines we’re enjoying today, our priority remains the wines that will accompany the special moments of your life, and ultimately, build your legacy.