Once you really delve deeply into wine, the passion to buy fine wine while it’s still available and its price hasn’t leaped into the stratosphere can become an obsession.
The feeling is both heady and worrisome. On the one hand, we love having great wines in the cellar, improving, but soon we realize we have too much wine! It’s inevitable.
And there is no little bell that goes off to tell you there’s plenty of wine in your cellar. Only when the storage space fills up and you start finding bottles in the shower do you realize your enthusiasm is out of control.
It starts innocently with a few bottles. Then, the word “buying” is replaced by “collecting.” We know this because instead of bottles, we are getting half-cases and cases of the good stuff. And some magnums.
We buy wines to consume young, and we buy already-mature wines to serve on special occasions. We get some wines to drink when they get more age and become mature.
Then, at some point, we must decide how we’re going to drink it. One way is to create more special moments and actively attack our cellars, rather than letting the wines deteriorate. We do more dinner parties, more excuses to bring out rare treasures.
I once belonged to a wine society dedicated to drinking up fine wines. “The Too-Much Wine Club” membership was made up of people who admitted they filled too many closets with bottles.
Years ago in Australia, I participated in yet another scheme to make use of older wine. The late Len Evans, ex-restaurateur, winery owner, and bon vivant, came up with the idea.
Called “the options game,” it was created mainly for those who were knowledgeable about wine, but it is fun to include those who know a little or nothing about wine and who'd like to learn more. It’s educational and lots of fun.
It is played like any wine guessing game, in which each person has brought a bottle for the others to identify.
Evans’s version of the Options Game calls for each person to start with 20 coins—dimes or nickels are best. It’s merely for tallying; the winner can take home the pot.
A wine is opened. All players get a few ounces. The person who brought it asks an “options” question. Assume that the wine is a 1998 Silverado cabernet. The first question is: Is the wine a California cabernet, a Bordeaux, or something else? Each person guesses. The contributor then announces the answer. All those who were wrong put a coin into a cup in the center of the table.
Knowing the wine is a cabernet, the guests are then asked, “Is it from Napa, Sonoma, or Central Coast?” After that, the query could be, “Is the wine above $75, between $30 and $75, or less than $30?” And so forth.
Even people who know little or nothing about wine can participate. With three choices, you have a 33 percent chance that each guess is correct.
Each wine normally takes 15 minutes. With four or five people playing, it takes an hour to play, during which time the first course of a meal is served.
Some sneaky people play this game. One particularly tough player brought a chardonnay that was in a Bordeaux-shaped bottle, so when we poured the wine (which was in a brown paper bag), most people assumed it couldn’t be a chardonnay!
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