Food / drink

A well-lubricated machine

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Three years ago I had a wine cabinet built in the basement. It took me another year or two to fill it with truly age-worthy wine, and now we find ourselves in a pretty luxurious position: wine is aging out of the cabinet as fast as it’s going in. I don’t even have to work that hard to fill it: my subscriptions and regular annual purchases more or less keep us in equilibrium. Here’s what that roster looks like:

(An aside: I’ve stopped purchasing from the LCBO Vintages releases every month as they massively overprice those wines, but I do add the odd bottle here or there.)

For those doing the math, that’s 204 incoming bottles per year. My best guess is that ~150 of those are age-worthy, which means ~150 older wines will come out of the cabinet to make room. Which means that each week we need to (ha ha, need to) consume three bottles which have aged out of the cabinet, plus one new ready-to-drink bottle that came in the same shipments, to maintain equilibrium. And yeah, four bottles is pretty much our week.

It has for sure ruined us for mediocre wine though. Just look at what’s on the ‘drink soon’ rack, next to the cabinet — I won’t list all 68 bottles, but just look at the Pinot Noir section:

  • 2022 SpearHead
  • 2021 Le Clos Jordanne Claystone Terrace
  • 2019 Le Clos Jordanne Le Grand Clos
  • 2020 Domaine d’Ardhuy Bourgogne Côte d’Or Les Chagniots
  • 2018 Five Rows
  • 2018 Hidden Bench Locust Lane Vineyard x2
  • 2019 Domaine Queylus Réserve du Domaine x2
  • 2018 Bachelder Lowrey Vineyards 1984 Plantation x2

Now, as you can tell by both this list and my subscriptions above, this is a very Canada-heavy — and specifically Ontario-heavy — collection. But guys, we love Chardonnay and Pinot and Cabernet Franc and Sparkling, all things at which Ontario excels. Plus, I’ll take the red blends from Hidden Bench and Leaning Post and Queylus over their doubly-expensive global alternatives all day. I don’t think I’m the only one whose collection would reflect their proximity to a world-class wine region; I just think many people don’t consider Ontario world-class, which is insane to me.

Not that we only drink Canadian, of course. 42% of what I have aging is from, in descending order, France, Italy, USA, Spain, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Portugal, Austria, Greece, Lebanon, New Zealand, Germany, and Hungary. I pick up bottles here and there when they sound interesting.

But my heart, and most of my dollars, are with the farmers and artists just across & up Lake Ontario.

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