Date: July 30, 2009 @ 11:28 AM

How many bottles of wine are in your future?

Have you ever stopped to consider how many bottles of wine are in your future? You should. It may surprise you that it isn’t as many as you might think and that you should be making good choices.

Recently I was at lunch with fellow winemaker, Bruce Cakebread, who said that people are getting tired of this recession and of trying to find something drinkable in the world of “Two-Buck-Truck Econo-wines.” He did a survey and went through a dozen under-ten-dollar wines before finding something that “almost wasn’t too bad” which is well short of “good.”  (I think that means he paid about $100 for a mediocre wine experience that included early carpel tunnel syndrome from pulling a dozen corks.)

I haven’t studied the economics of “drinking less but better” and suspect that there are graduate students in some economics department that are poised to create algorithms to quantify the benefits of drinking Dragonfly Vineyard vs Jug-O-Juice. I won’t read the results. (Likely, wouldn’t understand the results and don’t know what an algorithm does but hope that it isn’t connected to sub-prime mortgages.)

However, I told Bruce, not trying to be morbid, that I had gone through the exercise of figuring out how many bottles I am likely to consume in the time left to me. The short answer for someone who loves wine is: Not Enough!

What’s the lesson?  Life is too short to drink bad wine!

I tried getting Greg, “The Spreadsheet Guru”, to make a Lifetime Wine Calculator™ to help you. (We should trademark the concept, create an Apple Widget and add it to our Web site.)  It is the same idea as those retirement calculators that prove you need to save four times your salary if you are going to retire before you are 102 years old.

Let’s try a sample calculation to test The Lifetime Wine Calculator™. (It sounds like a word problem but there aren’t any trains leaving Chicago.)

My wife and I open three or four bottles per week. (I consider that moderate; it is used for illustration purposes only and I am polite enough to not ask about others’ drinking habits.) I am fifty two years old. (It is only the darn digital camera that makes me look like a contemporary of Moses.) Now comes the tricky part. How old are you going be when you peg out?  Actuarial tables give me good odds of making it to 77 (don’t smoke, maybe drive over the speed limit sometimes – but wear a seat belt, etc, etc). Since all winemakers are optimists, let’s say I am going to last to 80 and drink wine right up to the last nanosecond.

Time to plug in the super computer.

3.5 bottles/ wk x 52 weeks/yr x (80yrs – 53yrs) = X

I only have 4900 bottles left! It may sound like a lot but, that is less than 5000! That doesn’t include tasting, where, as a true professional, I expectorate (add some bottles).  It doesn’t include parties where I may be able to sponge wine off of other people (add more bottles – maybe even some magnums). It doesn’t include camping, where carrying heavy liquids in glass is out of the question unless we upgrade to having other people carry my backpack (subtract bottles).

What does it mean?

Since there are already over 450 wineries in Napa Valley, that would allow me to enjoy ten bottles of wine from each of my neighbors (and many of them make more than ten wines) and leave a small amount left over for enjoying all of the other wonderful wine areas.

There is only one conclusion; life is too short to waste time on bad wine.

Drink Great Wine.

So many wines…So little time!