When Harold was a younger man, he didn’t mind going to his wine storage locker and rummaging around for bottles. It was a kind of fun errand, dusting off the bottles, “visiting the children,” pulling a case of this and that on a Saturday afternoon. Harold was a pretty big guy and moving heavy boxes of wine was no problem…until he got a little older. Then his back started to give him some problems and, suddenly, picking up 40-pounds of dead weight in a 55-degree room became a less attractive proposition for him.
At a certain point in your life, going to your wine storage facility will be less glamorous. That bottle you want will, invariably, be in the bottom box in the back of the locker, requiring more effort than it’s worth to retrieve. It could mean that you’d have to move 10 cases or more, maybe standing on a step-ladder, or down on your knees to get it out, then put everything back into the locker like a Rubik’s Cube, getting sweaty and dirtying your clothes in the process.
With the time it takes to do all this, plus travel time, you’re into it for at least an hour out of your busy schedule. This is what you call your “free time.” How does this stack up as an opportunity cost? What do you bill per hour?
Face it: this part of wine collecting is a pain. If you’ve got enough wine that you need and can afford to pay for outside storage, you might want to ask yourself, “why am I doing this?”
Nobody really questions that you could manage your wine collection reasonably well if you put your mind to it. You could wash your own car and iron your own shirts too. It’s not a question of what you’re capable of, it’s how you choose to spend your time and use your talents.
But some people would rather let somebody else do the dirty work; moving heavy boxes in and out, and keeping the inventory up to date. Some people would rather hire an expert who, for a reasonable fee, can make wine collecting simpler and more pleasurable. Might you be better off hiring someone to pull it and have it ready for you at the desk when you show up? Or, better still, deliver it to your house or the restaurant or wherever you want? Or ship it to wherever you’re heading? Some people just want to sit back and enjoy it. I had this conversation with Harold, who was lugging two ancient milk bottle carriers full of aged Burgundy and Tuscan wines. “We must stop living like animals”, he said.
There is a better way. Full-service wine storage. Imagine a life of ease. Drinking wine at your leisure, free of these earthly encumbrances. Don’t worry, be happy. Let us handle it. Yes, friends, for just a few dollars more you can have your wine locker cataloged, the inventory available to you on a website and an app for your phone with all the information you could possibly hope for: vintage, bottle size, producer, country, region, vineyard, values, scores, suggested drink dates and a numbered location in your collection. You can export it to a spreadsheet or print it out like a restaurant wine list. You can be the Master of your Universe.
