How to start your Wine Collection?
There is a huge difference between people who collect wine and those who only buy it to enjoy it. Those last ones are to enjoy a random endeavor derived from the tastes and preferences, while a wine collector is a long-term commitment that requires vision, direction and planning. When you’re a collector, you will continue to buy the wines you love, but the purchases are going to be backed by rigorous research.
Great wine collectors show their talent by choosing great and excellent wines, if you are going to create your own wine collection; you must know how to define what they are and what guidelines they follow. Down below are the first steps to get started.
What wines to collect?
Your wine collection is an image of you. Regardless of what’s in trending right now, a great collection stays true to the collector's tastes. The process you go through to identify your top preferences should eventually lead you to create a vision or statement that defines your wine collection. This vision becomes a system of rules that you follow on your own when purchasing a new wine.
Investigation and study
Get ready, because you're going to do a lot of research. Before buying a case of that wine that may be your collection first wine, research the people and where the wine comes from. The safer you are, the better. Take into account the following points:
Basic research: Reviews, ratings, harvest reports, vineyard locations, the data sheets, the tastings and the price.
Advanced research: The profile of the wine producer, the history of the vineyard, the history of the region's wines, who imports the wine, how long is the wine expected to age, the other wines the producer makes, when were the grapevines planted and others.
Rigorous Research: Who Owns the Vineyard? (is it a multi-brand Company?), to whom is it distributed? (restaurants, shops, membership lists), How long has the vineyard been in operation? The wine's launch date, the producer's ideology, what other vineyards or people have influenced the producer's ideology for this vineyard, the other wines they make, what are their plans for the future? (New equipment or property purchase), etc.
Storage time
Unlike any other collectibles such as paintings, wines have a cycle of life that depends on the nature of the alcohol. So, learning about what makes a wine age well is an important part for any collector's education. You have to be able to calculate when will it be the right moment to drink an aged wine or as well, sell it.
Periodic assessments
What today makes you go crazy, could bore you tomorrow (and vice versa) the more knowledge you get, the more your tastes will continue to change. It's smart to do appraisals of your wine collection from time to time, not only to confirm its current status, but also to consider new varieties and reconsider your old choices.
If you are convinced of starting your own wine collection, you should know that there are some devices that can help you to taste a wine without having to open the entire bottle, such is the case of the Coravin.
Do you want to know how this excellent system to taste wine without uncorking it works?
The Coravin system is very simple to operate: the access system inserts a very small diameter Teflon coated stainless steel needle through the cork. Once inside, the Coravin system inserts a argon inside, pressurizing the wine. This allows, on the one hand, to serve the wine from the bottle and on the other, by not uncorking the bottle, the wine continues to evolve inside it as if it had never been accessed.
This original system has two types of needle that adapts to two different types of needs. On the one hand, there would be the Vintage Needle, this one is thinner than the standard needle and is specifically designed to access those older wine bottles whose cork may be more weakened by the passage of time. Thanks to it, this system facilitates the tasting in small doses of these wines from the past, with the certainty that the beverage will maintain the flavor it had when it was bottled.
The other needle that Coravin offers is, is the quick pour needle. This is a wider needle than the standard one, and it allows you to pour a glass of wine more quickly. Wine lovers can thus enjoy corked wine without feeling the need to compromise the wine by uncorking the entire bottle, allowing them to explore wines of any era, variety or region in small quantities.
Origin and pedigree
If your goal is to buy today and resell in the future, it’s very important that you have everything documented. From, what were the conditions of the purchase, where it was purchased, who sent it to you and where it has been stored. This will make you and your bottles trustful, therefore, easy find a buyer.
Reselling wines
Reselling is the biggest challenge that collectors face and the reason behind is that selling a wine of this type can be quite difficult because it requires a great social building around the variety they could sell. There are several y ways to resell a wine, however, the best option is to sell them through auctions.
One last recommendation and the most important
If you are going to invest a good part of your time and money to start your wine collection, you must make sure to find a trusted supplier or store to buy the wines, and of course they have to meet a series of requirements, regarding the quality of the product you’re buying, as well as responsibility and punctuality in the deliveries of the orders you make and provide an appropriate and personalized customer service.
The online store finding.wine; has enough references and characteristics to convince any wine buyer and collector. Its staff has the experience and knowledge necessary to answer any doubt and help their buyers.
Likewise, this online wine store has a club for collectors, where memberships are offered with excellent benefits monthly, a really amazing option for wine collectors, which also includes some events related to the activity with other wine lovers.
Final recommendations if you want to start this beautiful hobby of collecting wine.
Remember that it will be useless to have a huge collection of incredible wines if you have no idea how, when and what to drink them with, that’s why each bottle needs special care, so making notes and putting labels on their necks will help you to keep the order wherever you’re storing your collection, in addition to making it a passion and a reason to keep learning about wines. You must write down the year you bought it and the year or month when you should drink it. It’s a good practice to also write down on its label the pairing possibilities of that bottle.
Collecting wines is synonym of collecting experiences. That is why I believe that wine is the one of the most positive collections that someone could do. The only one in which you need to try wines to be able to master, which becomes more interesting if it is shared with relatives or close friends.
Enjoy the beginning of this adventure that will make you value so much more when someone invites you a glass of wine at their home.
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