Accidentally opening an expensive bottle of wine
 

I suspect that most of us who enjoy wine own a variety of bottles at a variety of price points. Years ago I started writing the price of the wine on the bottle, because if you keep & store wine for any period of time, it's hard to remember how much you paid for a bottle. (The exception: Mainstream wine that I drink often enough to know the price off the top of my head.)

Last week I came across a bottle in my stash without a price, but seemed to remember buying it after being poured a sample at Whole Foods. I opened on Monday, had a glass & really enjoyed it, vacuum capped it & threw it in the fridge, had a glass or two the next night & finished it the third night. It was a great drinkable wine & I liked it enough to think, "I need to buy more of this. It's a great $10 or $15 bottle of wine."

Today I googled it & realized that I didn't drink an inexpensive everyday wine, but rather Jonata's 2005 El Corazon de Jonata...made by the same people behind Screaming Eagle.

I guess it could be worse: It's "only" a $70 wine, but not readily available and I only have (had) two bottles. No, I didn't buy it at Whole Foods--though I did find a bottle of Sea Smoke Southling there today. I bought it from Lot18 a few months ago. I guess OTBN came early for me.

Boys & girls, this is why you need to track the prices you paid for wines!

Ask and you shall receive... www.cellartracker.com

This is a free program where you can enter the details of your wine purchases. I've been using it ever since they began. If you anty up a small amount, the site reveals many additional functions.

I'm on the Sea Smoke mailing list. As a matter fact, I brought a bottle to WineDo 4 last year.

dh

I guess. But frankly it's all in the enjoyment for me. Seriously: I really enjoy forgetting the price of everything once the cost is sunk.

I never consider the price when I grab a bottle of wine for dinner or whatever. There's a group I don't want to age I won't drink, but be it pizza or a fancy dinner party, everything in the cellar is fair game.

I'm an avid cellartracker user, and half the time I don't enter the price I paid because for the most part, it has no bearing if I'm gonna drink it or not.

Though I do know people who use red, green and yellow dots on all their bottles, green for every day, yellow for getting up there in price, and red only for special occasions.

Wine should be drunk when it's ready to drink. What does the original purchase price matter if the wine is at risk of falling off its peak?

People who worry about how much a wine they already own costs remind me of those who play blackjack at table minimums higher than they can afford, and won't double down or split because "it's so much money!" You're only throwing away your original bet if you can't play the hand properly.

Now you would not forget Napa Valley Silver Oak would you?

+1 ^

Ah, this thread makes me pine for the days when I didn't live in a closet and had enough space for a decent wine collection.

If i ever get to keep enough bottles long enough to actually develop a cellar, I will keep your suggestion in mind. Since I'm usually firmly in the $15-$30 price range recently, it doesn't matter all that much.

Also, the dots idea that cordelli suggested sounds a little less gauche than actually writing prices on the bottles. If nothing else, it could allow you to tell your house guests to "only open the bottles with green dots on them", especially if your guests were family members for whom you did not care very much.

At least you got to enjoy your wine. I've also had the opposite - keeping a bottle too long and having to throw it out.

My thoughts, too. You opened it and enjoyed it. What's the problem? Were you "saving" it for something "special"? I could probably understand your frustration more if it wasn't ready to drink yet.

Sounds like it was good and you should be happy. There will be plenty of other bottles of wine in your future.

It's a bottle that could have been cellared for a few more years. Had I realized what I was drinking, I wouldn't have thrown it in the fridge for 3 days (though it held up remarkably well), I would have made more of an effort to match it with foods and I probably would have invited a friend to enjoy it with me.

There's also disappointment of really enjoying what I thought was an inexpensive, everyday bottle of wine that I could drink regularly, only to discover that isn't a viable option because supply is limited and I can't afford to open >$50 bottles on a weekly basis.

OK. But you bought it to drink at some point. Just seems like your complaints are superficial. You enjoyed it, right? Doesn't sound like your food choice or inability to share it impacted you adversely.

I color-code my bottles, but just the higher end stuff. Green means go. This lets me know that I'd be wasting my money to let it sit any longer. I now treat every bottle as a sunk cost, so I choose based on the occasion rather than cost. Also I learned a little trick for special sentimental bottles. Drink it and and put the bottle back in the cellar. When I see the bottle I still have the memory.

This reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me a while back: He was at his parent's house looking for a bottle of wine to open up, so he chose one which did not look that expensive and finished it with a couple of his mates. When his parents came home, they were quite cross. It turned out he had actually opened a bottle worth about €200 (probably exaggerated by him, but still).