How to Buy Wine for an Empty Wine Cellar

Long-aging wines in the top rows, wines that are ready to drink at the bottom.

So you've just bought a 400-bottle wine cellar, and the twelve bottles of wine that followed you home from that last vacation are looking pretty lonely in there. Now what?

It helps if you've bought the cellar when good vintages of your favorite wines are on the market. It also helps if you have a bottomless bank account. But here, let's work with conditions that are under your control.

Difficulty:

Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• A wine cellar
• String tags or other method to label your wines
• Subscriptions to one or more reputable wine magazines, or
• A good sommelier at a good local wine shop, or
• Internet access

1. Know your tastes. And know what you're buying for: to drink or to collect? If you plan to drink all the wines you buy, that would probably lead to a different price point than buying as an investment.

2. List wines you like, either regions or specific wineries. Or, if you're buying wines to pair with food, list cuisines that you like and find out which wines match them best. For example, Italian cuisine and the traditional Italian wines made from native grapes like Sangiovese and Nebbiolo have evolved together over millennia; they're a great match!

3. In your list, notice which wines benefit from aging and which don't. The better they age, the more space you want to dedicate to them in your cellar.

4. Consult vintage charts. Of the wines you like, which have good vintages currently on the market? If you target good vintages, you can find second- and third-tier producers who had a great year but still charge reasonable prices based on their long-term reputation. Or, you can go for the top producers' secondary labels or secondary vineyards; you get all their winemaking expertise applied to second-tier grapes at a table-friendly price point.

5. Once you've identified exceptional vintages, start researching individual producers. Go to tastings, read magazine reviews including the tasting notes, or go online. If you find your mouth is watering while you're reading tasting notes, you're on to something.

6. Know your reviewers' tastes. For example, Robert Parker has a reputation for loving "fruit bombs," wines in which fruit rather than terroir or other flavor components dominate.

7. If you're a person who likes variety, consider buying no more than four bottles of any given wine unless it's one you like.

8. Strike a balance: Know when to pounce on a particularly good wine (they go fast!), but bide your time waiting for those fantastic finds.

9. When you find the right wine, go for it! If you're buying from a distant source, ask them to store it for you so you can fill a case and ship during cool weather.

10. When you receive the wine, tag it before putting it in your cellar. On the tag, include at least the wine's name, vintage, and drink dates (like "best from 2014 to 2024"). We also include where we bought it, price, scores, magazine issues in which it was reviewed, number of bottles we bought, total amount produced, and tasting notes.

11. Put wines that need long aging on the top of the cellar, and wines that are ready to drink on the bottom. Your cellar is likely to be warmer at the top than the bottom, so this promotes the best rates of aging.

Tips & Warnings

• If you want to spend your money on wine instead of wine magazines, there are great resources available online. For example, zachys.com publishes scores and tasting notes from several of the most respected wine magazines, often before the issue comes out. Zachys also has a fantastic selection, although you do pay a bit of a premium.

• If your wine cellar is the two-bottles-deep variety, buy even numbers of bottles, especially of wines that need to age a long time. This helps you use space efficiently and keeps you from losing track of wines.

• I've got a rule of thumb: $10 per point above 90 on the Wine Spectator's scale. That is, I'll pay up to $10 for a 91-point wine, up to $50 for a 95-point wine, and so on. I adjust the scale for Tanzer because he scores more conservatively, and I don't buy based on Parker's scores because I like terroir and earth more than fruit and oak. The point is to know your own tastes and use the ratings to satisfy your tastes rather than trying to adjust your tastes to match someone else's.

• Don't fill your cellar with short-lived wines unless you've got definite plans to use them up soon. It's no fun to pass up on great wines because your cellar is full of whites that need to be drunk yesterday.