175 Bottles Post 01: Racks and Wines
Of all the journeys I’ve wanted to take, had expected to take, or ever planned to take, this one would be the very last one on my list. If it made the list at all. We’re not wine connoisseurs. We’re barely wine drinkers. Yet here we are, the sudden and slightly befuddled owners of 175 bottles of wine. We didn’t gather a wine collection over years of purchases and gifts. Instead, the bottles arrived on our doorstep all at once, in 14 separate boxes, lovingly packed for safety in transit in cardboard and bubble wrap.
Here’s what happened. A couple of years ago, I gave my husband a wine club membership for either his birthday or for Christmas. We picked out the wines, they arrived as promised, and we proceeded to drink them over the course of many, many months. Like I said, we’re not big wine drinkers. And that was that. When the wine was gone, we forgot all about the wine club. After all, I figured that if we didn’t order wine, we weren’t going to be charged.
Fast forward to 2025, and like so many others, we found ourselves scouring through our bank and credit card records, looking for subscriptions and other charges we could get rid of in order to slim down our spending. And that’s when we discovered that, unbeknownst to us, our wine club membership was alive and well and charging our credit card as per our membership agreement. Thinking to cut our losses, we attempted to close our subscription. That’s when we discovered that we had accumulated almost $3,000 worth of credits! So, we did the only reasonable and rational thing we could – we ordered about $3,000 worth of wine. All at once! The company couldn’t even process the order; it was too big. We had to place three orders, one right after the other. But it worked!
The next step was, of course, to open all the boxes and organize their contents. Red, white, rose, sparkling. Single-varietal and blends (see, I’m learning already) from California, Italy, France, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, New Zealand, and Spain. Multiples of most bottles. And, strangely enough, about 10 bottles’ worth of Brut in individual cans! My husband dutifully put them in their categories and lined up the groups on the floor of our living room. They took up more than 12 feet of space, sitting in groups five-to-six-bottles deep.
Now what? How do you store 175 bottles of wine? I casually joked that we could build a wine cellar in the basement and become “one of those” houses. Nah! We live in the burbs, and we’re definitely not wine cellar people. So, we ordered a couple of wine racks instead. And here we are! Two wine racks with 128 bottles, 10 more bottles on the built-in wine rack of our bar cart (we are whiskey, tequila, vodka, and brandy drinkers, for the record), and the rest packed back in their travel boxes until we’ve gone through enough bottles to take them back out.
So, the way I figure it, we have something like 60 unique wines to try. How long this will take is anyone’s guess. But I couldn’t let the opportunity pass by, so for each new, unique wine we open, I will write a post on this blog. And since we’re not wine experts (have I mentioned?), there won’t be much about bouquets, body, legs, or other winey words, but there will be honest opinions about tastes, flavors, food pairings, usage in cooking, friends’ and family’s feedback, and anything else that might come up. Cheers!