Three or so weeks ago I decided to take an early night off of work and take a beautiful girl, that I am very interested in, to a special restaurant up on Lake Martin called Spring House. Now I wanted this night to be perfect....so I called the chef to let him know we were coming, I planned the timing perfect so we could enjoy sunset, I looked up the menu online to know exactly what to order that night, and most importantly I brought an amazing bottle of wine. In this case Shafer's 2001 Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon from the Stag's Leap District of Napa Valley in California. To me this is no mere bottle of wine....this is a bottle which I had kept in a climate controlled cooler for many years and that had traversed the country with me as I worked in various locations. When I decided to drink this very special bottle that night it began to occur to me that the importance of this bottle was not only monetary but also emotional and almost spritual. I mean this bottle had been like a pet to me, that had been all over the country... through 3 or 4 apartments that I lived in...transported every time with the care of the Hope diamond! I then remembered the amount that I paid for this bottle...upwards of $200...which brought me here...writing this blog. I often hear from non-cork dorks a very simple question...."Why would somebody pay so much for a single bottle of wine?" Now for some one like me that is a no brainer....BECAUSE IT IS A 2001 HILLSIDE SELECT!!! However to most people that means very little..so I began to think...how could I illustrate to the common person the intrinsic value of such rare piece of the wine world.
To start I began thinking of the sheer value of a single bottle of wine from a monetary stand point and how it is derived in an open market. Keynesian economic theory, which is one of the foremost economic theory's in our time, sates the law of supply and demand...meaning that if there is a huge demand for an item and a very low supply for that same item, than the cost will rise. Sounds simple right? Well here is the argument for most people against why a bottle of wine should not be so expensive by this theory...there is no shortage of wine in this world...and moreover in the current economy there is huge stock piles of wine that wineries and distributors can't give away....yet every vintage a bottle of say Chateau Mouton Rothschild increases in value and sells almost every bottle before it is even fermented! The answer to this part of the question is that to everybody the difference between a bottle of Doug Shafer and Elias Fernandez's 2001 Hillside Select is no different than a bottle of the Gallo Familie's Tickle Pink Boone's Farm....I mean to some people a bottle of wine is nothing more than a bottle of wine! That being said, to some of us that is simply not the case...and to the rest of you...well basically you should be slapped for ever thinking such a thing.
To most people that drink wine regularly a big part of the reason a bottle of wine can still be considered "rare," even in times when so much wine is on the market, is because some of us know that a certain bottle of wine comes from a very special place on the earth...and in this special place the grapes are grown a certain way....cared for intensely over the course of their life...harvested at exactly the right time...and eventually put into a bottle for us to enjoy. So if this is something you believe let me break down a few statistics to show you the actual rarity of a single bottle of wine, from a certain area of the world, in a certain year. To begin lets look at the investment that a winemaker in the Napa Valley must make to produce wine. On average an acre of land under vine that produces grapes in Napa cost somewhere between one hundred and twenty thousand dollars and three hundred thousand dollars. The average for a small winery is around a million dollars. Then you have labor, barrels, marketing, and so on and so on... so to say the least it is a very big investment. Now lets look at the rarity of a single bottle of wine in sheer statistics! There are currently about four hundred wineries in Napa that produce around nine point two million cases of wine annually....that equals out to one hundred million, four hundred thousand bottles of wine a year. That means that if you are holding one bottle of wine from Napa you are holding .00000009% of that years anual production....small number right....but how small. Well the distance between the earth and the sun is about a hundred million miles, give or take a few million. This means that if you were floating out in space somewhere, you could be in a space ship a mile long (and by the way the Starship Enterpirse was only about twelve hundred feet long), and the length of your space ship would be about the same percentage of that same single bottle of wine from a single harvest in Napa....kinda puts it into perspective don't it Captain Kirk! So is that the answer....it's the simple rarity...well if that is the case than all bottles of wine from a certain area would carry that type of value...so what is it then?
To this sommelier it is a mixture of a few things that are both tangible and intangible. It is a proven fact that the more of anything you eat or drink the more your palate gets used to it and there fore changes. This means that some one who has never tasted wine would never appreciate wine like I or many other millions of wine drinkers around the world do. The Hillside Select would very simply taste "better" to me than to a non wine drinker because of my experience and palate....that is why you will rarely know some one that doesn't drink wine that will ever understand the reason we pay so much for a bottle of wine....but that's only half of the answer....if those people wouldn't pay so much what about the people that will?
That is about where I was in my screwed up little wine lovers brain when I let Lacey pour my date and I the first sip of the Hillside Select that had been decanting for well over an hour. As we each took that first sip...that first pefect sip where my dates eyes lit up like diamonds in the sunlight...where I tasted for the first time the perfectly seamless tannins...the dark chocolate that gave way to a subtle tobacco and finished with a polished vanilla...that was the very moment that the answer to my question hit me like a ton of bricks. All of these things really shouldn't matter to anybody except the person that is drinking such an incredible bottle of wine! The value comes from those of us that can truly can savor and enjoy the wine for what it is...not the cost...not the pain staking measures to keep it perfectly stored...but instead that moment in time that the person or persons drinking that bottle will always remember and cherish! I know that until I go to wino heaven, where we all start our day with a glass of Chateau Y'Quem and end it with a 1976 Dows vintage port and a plate of chocolate chip cookies (port and chocolate chip cookies....trust me!), I will always remember the awesome time I had that night....how perfect the food, the company, the service, and most of all that 2001 Hillside Select truly was! Now if you tell me that you still do not understand why someone would pay so much for a bottle of wine...then you name me some other item that will put a smile on your face, as big as the one I get when thinking of that bottle of wine and the memory of the night that accompanies it and I will guarantee you, what ever that thing is, it won't be cheap!!!
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