Some years ago now we decided to purchase a small wine cellar/refrigerator. We belonged to a local wine club and decided to give cellaring a try on a very small scale. There was quite a buzz about the year 2000 wines so we bought a few to kick off our nascent cellar. A few months later we went to a port tasting and we were blown away by the vintage port we tasted there. We thought it would be lovely to have some on our tenth anniversary but having just done a bit of research on it will probably wait a bit longer than that. For Christmas we got a couple very nice wines indeed so I decided it is time to make a little folder for our tiny collection and map out drinkable dates for each vintage.

These are the 2000 wines with which we began our little endeavor. We have a bordeaux, a margaux and a port. The port we tasted, as I mentioned, but we have no clue what the other two will be like. It’ll be a lot of fun to open them some time in the future and see how they matured.

The Shiraz is a mystery wine, neither of us can remember how it made it into our little cellar but when I looked it up it seems very nice. The Silver Oak Cabernet is a wine I’ve been drinking for many years now although it seldom fits in the budget anymore. This year it was given to us as a gift and we thought it was definitely a cellar worthy wine. The Brunello was another wine gift that fell into the cellaring category this year as was the  Brandlin Cabernet which is the inaugural vintage for this wine. I can’t find statistics on the 03 Brandlin cab but the 04 got high marks and sounds absolutely delicious. If I remember correctly we should be able to fit 24 bottles of wine in our little cellar so we have plenty of room to grow.