Am I label drinker ?dimanche, 11 mars 2007

Am I label drinker ?

I am going to make a conference in the University of Bordeaux about old wines and gastronomy.

And, preparing this conference, I calculated some statistics.

Since the middle of 2000, I have a record of all what I drink. And I have a file concerning 4,504 wines. Just to have an idea, it makes two wines per day. But as my consumption is less than 37 cl, it means that in average, every bottle to which I have access is shared by 4 people.

I have made very interesting statistics about the age of a wine when I drink it, having noted on which year I drank it and what was its vintage.

Here is the average age of what I drink. Between () is the approximate number of bottles per month :

Champagne : 18.5 years of age (7.7 bt shared per month)
White dry wines : 26.1 years (13.9 bt)
Red Bordeaux : 36.4 years (13.3 bt)
Red Burgundy : 37.4 years (7.8 bt)
Sweet or liquorous wines : 45.5 years (7.3 bt)
Others : 29,9 years (8.5 bt)

Global : 31.9 years (58.5 bt)

It must be said that the average includes also the wines that I drank in barrels.

I have ranked the wines per decade, and among the 4,504 wines, the greatest decade is the 90ies with 1137 wines (which tends to mean that I do not drink “only” old wines), followed by the 80ies with 727 wines, and the 2000ies with 562 wines (including the barrels). So, to have an average of 31.9 years means that I have drunk very old wines. For example, in the decade 1920-1929, I have drunk 269 wines.

On this statistics, wines before 1970 represent 1704 wines, so 22 per month : nearly one a day, with an average age of 63 years.

I wanted to see what some famous wines represent and I took only a few, and here is what it gives, showing how label chaser I am :
only three champagnes : Krug, Salon and Dom Pérignon : 2.5 per monthonly Montrachet, Chevalier Montrachet, Batard Montrachet and Corton Charlemagne : 2.4 per monthonly Chateau Chalon in Jura wines : 1.1 per monthAusone, Cheval Blanc and Pétrus : 1.2 per monthMargaux, Latour, Lafite, Mouton, Haut-Brion and Mission : 3.9 per monthWines of Romanée Conti : 1.4 per monthYquem : 1.8 per month

And globally, these wines represent 1095 wines, so 14.2 per month

I did not count Guigal Lalas, Chave, Vega Sicilia Unico and so on. Just these wines.

They represent 24.3% of what I have consumed, which allows me to say : I am a label chaser.

Of course, on the contrary, there are 75.7% of what I have drunk which are not these precious labels. Which shows with evidence that I am not a label chaser.

I have noticed many times that when I accept to make a conference, it helps me to study a subject. In this case I studied the age and the type of what I have consumed on an approximate period of 77 months.