Wannabe Wino Wine Blog

As I played around with my blog this weekend, I got to thinking about how much wine I taste and/or drink every year.  Before I started the wine blog, I would have categorized myself as a casual wine drinker.  I would mostly split a bottle with Matt on Friday or Saturday nights or if we went out to a restaurant.  Of course, my friend Kim and I had our own tasting every Tuesday night where we alternated houses and introducing each other to different wines. See, I was pretty much a white wine only person and Kim was decidedly in the red wine only camp.  We made a good pair and generally made our way through mounds of junk food and several bottles of wine while we watched Gilmore Girls and Supernatural. Man I miss those nights!

Then came our first trip to Sonoma and I got bit hard by the wine bug. And it didn’t hurt that I then had 12+ cases on hand plus more arriving all the time from the 10 or so wine clubs we joined.  Soon, wine became a part of our dinner, the meal didn’t seem complete without it.  Over the last 3ish years, I’d say we probably open at least 5 bottles a week, and sometimes more if we have company or I decide to go on a tasting spree to clear out some samples. Otherwise, the basement starts to look like this:

The wine monster.

So I decided to do some quick tallying of wines since I started the blog.  I’ve written about at least 630 individual bottles of wine in less than 3 years. I’ve visited around 70 vineyards and/or wineries. I’ve gone to dozens of wine tastings.  If I had to guess I probably taste around 700-900 or so wines a year if you combine all tasting formats.  I think that’s pretty decent given I’m just one person, I buy most of our wine (thinking about that, I would guess I buy about 20 or so cases of wine a year, sheesh!), and I only manage maybe 2 wine country trips a year! But what about you? How many different wines do you taste a year? Do you think you taste enough to keep developing your palate? Where do you taste the most wines, at home, at tastings, vineyards?  Do you think the different tasting formats affect your experience with the wine?

Filed under: Misc, Wine |