Are people aging wine anymore?
The opportunity behind the decline of consumer cellaring.
Back in March, I listened to an episode of the All the Hacks podcast by Chris Hutchins that featured guest Kevin Rose. In it, Rose talked about losing his home—and his entire wine collection—in the Palisades Fire earlier this year.
It’s a conversation that burned itself (no pun intended) into my brain, particularly one moment when Rose reflected on how his mindset toward wine (and “stuff” in general) changed afterward:
“In my mind… if I have an event to celebrate and I want a nice bottle of wine, I can just go buy a nice bottle of wine that day…I don’t have to own it”
This is obviously a very extreme story, but I think it reflects what’s true for a lot of wine consumers these days. I also can’t help but speculate that this is one of the secret reasons we are seeing fewer wine purchases these days, because people aren’t buying as much wine “in advance” as they were before and are instead purchasing wine as they need it.
There’s a frequently quoted statistic that somewhere between 50-98 % wine is opened within 48 hours of purchasing it. While I couldn’t find a more recent study that pins that number down more precisely, a 2018 paper by Dr. Liz Thach, MW, and Dr. Angelo Camillo from Sonoma State University found that roughly 90% of wine is consumed within a couple of weeks of purchase, with only about 20% opened within 24 hours.
Based on nothing other than personal experience and anecdotes, I’d imagine that percentage has likely increased: wine isn’t really hanging out in the cellar for long, if at all.
Is This the End of the Cellar Era?
For a very long time, buying wine meant building a collection. People had racks, fridges, and even entire rooms dedicated to letting their wine age.
These days, I’d guess that most wine drinkers live in smaller spaces, move more often, and don’t have the time (or temperature control) to properly age wine. Even among the “serious” drinkers I personally know, the vast majority of bottles are opened within months of purchase, with only a handful of wines being saved for a “special occasion.”
That shift has cultural roots. In this age of free two-day shipping and instant gratification, we aren’t really saving wine for a rainy day. We open them on a random Tuesday because, *gestures at world*, we need some kind of joy.
There’s something to be said about living in the now, yes? But it also means fewer people are experiencing the magic of a well-aged wine, and that makes me sad.
I Have Too Much Wine
As someone who photographs wine for a living, I have more bottles than I know what to do with.
Clients gift me bottles after shoots, and sometimes they tell me to just keep the wine I’m photographing because it’s too much of a hassle to ship it back to them. So my little “cellar” (read: hall closet) currently holds, conservatively at most recent inventory, twenty cases.
Whenever my dad visits, I send him home with a case. When I go to dinner, I bring a bottle as a host gift. Last week, our neighbors had their trees trimmed and had the arborists trim our side as well, so they and the arborists got wine.
And yet, maybe 5% of my “collection” is wine I’m intentionally aging. The rest just lives there, waiting to be opened by someone, if not by me.
And what’s wild is that when I was drinking wine regularly (I’m currently pregnant, so that ship will be circling the harbor for a few more months), I would more often than not end up buying the wine I wanted to drink that week versus pulling from the closet. I simply cannot keep enough sangiovese, cab franc, gruner veltliner, or riesling in my house.
So, as you can see, even someone like me, who works in the wine industry and understands how great an aged bottle of wine can be, rarely has the time, space, or patience to do it properly. Womp, womp.
Wineries are Keepers of Time
I know that some wineries purposefully hold back a handful of cases of each vintage and will rerelease them as library wines later. This isn’t a new idea, obviously, but I do think it’s an underused one, especially for small and mid-sized producers.
If most consumers don’t have the space or resources to age wine themselves, I think library wines are a great way to introduce (or reintroduce) them to the joy of aged wine without asking them to invest in storage, or to remember which bottles are “ready.”
I’ve seen a couple of wineries at events I attended this year bring out some library vintages to pour and sell, which is SO smart, especially for younger consumers who literally have not had the time to age wines longer than a couple of years.
Imagine offering a side-by-side tasting of your current vintage and one from ten years ago, or an “aged by us” promotion! Very hip, very cool, very accessible for the youngins.
And if your winery isn’t in a place to hang onto that much wine, there are some wineries, like Tablas Creek, who have created a vintage chart that shows when each vintage of each wine needs more aging, is “Drinking Well: Youthful,” “Drinking Well: Mature,” “Late Maturity (Drink Up),” “Decanting recommended,” or “Past Its Prime.” This is such a great way to serve your customers and educate them on how they can enjoy your wine at its best without having to hold onto inventory (I see you wineries who live by the philosophy, “A bird in the hand”).
The TL;DR
It’s cool if people aren’t really aging wine much anymore, but I believe this trend opens the door for some really interesting marketing and educational opportunities for wineries.
Find a way to get some older wines into the hands of your fans if you can, and if you can’t, help give them the tools and knowledge to do it themselves.
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The only issue with the it was cellared and aged at the winery promotion is the auction circuits and if a winery does have a library wine or wine exclusive to club members, with patience I can probably find that same wine within a few months on auction. I can also find it cheaper too sometimes. Of course there is a risk as you don't know how it was previously stored compared to the winery, but you start seeking the lots of the good collectors or the restaurants that sadly went out of business and selling their inventory who most likely bought it directly from the winery.
The old-school 'collector' mentality was great for wineries years ago, but those collectors are aging out and buying less. Consumers want something ready to drink, FOMO, and on to the next. I sell out every vintage and frequently run out of a SKU and I don't think twice about it. Do I keep some Cab around to see how it ages out? Sure. Do I get joy in a customer showing me a wine they bought 10 years ago drinking great? Of course. But they are the exception, not the rule