Uncovering memories
We value things that anyone else don't give a f — —
The other day I saw a post in the r/wine group on reddit that made me rethink my approach to collecting wine. The story was that the son of a wine collector put up for sale the wines from his late dad, the redditor paid around 200–300 USD for the entire lot, some wines were ok while others where in excellent condition.
A pretty good deal probably for the son and the redditor, but It got me thinking about my own habits. I been purchasing wine for more than 20 years, I put a lot of time to built a humble collection. My approach has always been to combine travel with my passion for wine, and since I had a passport I always try to meet with winemakers that are not probably so well known but are producing good juices. With this approach I managed to collect hundreds of bottles from places like: Argentina, France, Spain and US, most of them bought directly from the winemakers, others from very special wines stores from all over the world.
Endowment Effect
As humans, we tent to overvalue the things that we own. The classic example is when you put something for sale on craiglist of your favorite marketplace app, a bicycle, at table you name it. The same thing happens to wine collectors, and in my case here is the intrinsic value, effort and memory I put into each bottle of wine I have. These are things that are valuable to me and not to anyone else, not even my direct relatives. For them, and for everyone else, they just see a bottle of wine, and old bottle of wine.
Drink your wine
So that brings me to the last point, and something I been debating for a long time, should I continue hoarding wine of should I start drinking some of it?. This is when I go back to that reddit post and see a reflection of what could happen.
I arrived to the reality that unless you as a collector (which I’m not) have a way to proof if your expensive wine was well stored during all these years, you will be better off starting drinking your wine. Invite some friends over, cook a nice dinner and revive with the people you love the memories and experience that each bottle brought to you.
