I like to buy at least 3-4 bottles of a style I like, even if it means a less expensive bottle. Try one immediately then drink them over the years

Get some cellar defenders

Great start. Warning, wine collecting may be habit forming and cause teeth to turn purple. It’s not too late to turn back.

When I started I got the Bordeaux bug and then as my experience and palate broadened I expanded to other areas. Are you looking to broaden within a particular area or do you want more coverage of fine wine growing regions not represented here? Because if it’s the latter your remaining obvious holes are Northern and Southern Rhône, Spain, Brunello, Champagne, California Cabs and German Riesling, and Sauternes and Vintage Port on the sweet side.

Have you tried these wines with some age on them? I always find it a little crazy to commit to long term storage for a wine I haven’t tried or a style I’m not familiar with yet. Not saying is the case here, I’m not sure what you’re experience is, but something I see some newbies doing haha

Solid start! But why no white wines?

If you wanna build a large collection relatively quickly see if any of the wine distribution companies in your area do dock sales. For me in Oregon i can go up to Portland and its a 2 case minimum and i can buy at wholesale

On top of the other advice here, I'd recommend figuring out storage as soon as you can. Home storage options abound, but your average wine cooler isn't really optimal for storing over a period of years, and you'll rapidly run out of space. If you're fortunate enough to have offsite storage available it's a great option because any reputable storage facility will keep your wine at optimal cellar conditions, but you also have to factor in rising 'overhead' cost as your cellar grows.

Decide whether or not you want to 'invest' and what makes wines investment-worthy, even if the whole point of 'investing' is to sell some wine to buy more wine.

Most of the wines I have in my personal cellar at home are just ones I ended up picking up here or there that I haven’t drank yet. Honestly, I didn’t put a whole lot of thought into it; I just buy what I’m interested in when I get interested in it. I do also own some additional wines that are stored in other facilities, but these are part of my investments with Vinovest. I have no intention of drinking those wines; I am just holding them while they accrue value so I can sell them years from now at a profit. If you ever decide to do something like that, I suggest using a company like Vinovest instead of doing it on your own; it’s way easier.

I started buying 4 of each. Drink 1, cellar 3 or sell them off if I don't like them.

Buy what you like at a faster rate than you drink it. Before you know it you'll have hundreds of bottles and nowhere to store them all. Keep a stash of cellar defenders on hand (i.e., less expensive drink now wines), so you aren't tempted to open anything too early because all you have are higher-priced age-worthy bottles. Conversely, don't be shy to open a nice bottle on a random Tuesday simply because it's in its drinking window and/or it goes perfectly with what you're eating. It's devastating to open a bottle that's been held too long waiting for that "special occasion."

Imo you want to start a collection when you know what your taste is like. Get familiair with the variety of grape and just start buying stuff you like. The collection will start forming itself.

Im not sure what to tell you otherwise I mean, you are 21. There is no use to start collecting bottles because someone tells you those are the bottles to collect.

For example: Riesling can age great. So you could start buying 2019 rieslings from the Alsace for the future, but what if you dont even like Riesling?

Don’t go over two cases until you have proper long term storage. Don’t EVER go beyond 400 bottles total. Been there, done that, and dropping numbers with great intention at this point. Every year brings new exposure to more chateaux and more regions and the “arms race” never ends. Imagine the locked, special display section at Total Wine. Now, think fifty times that. That is how crazy friends have gone overboard. A couple maxims to live by: if it is too great to open just because, open it; if you are drinking over-the-hill bottlings, stop acquiring. Label worship is different from label respect…no untouchable bottles!

My question: where are you storing this wine? Do you have a properly cooled/humidified cellar?

If not, just enjoy your wines now.

Also, are you buying for drinking or for investing? If for investing you probably would need to save those 20-30 euros for some months before purchasing anything

Figure out what you like and buy that!

I didn't choose to have a wine collection, it just happened.

I feel that one, in the first 2-3 years I legit bought wine every month. I quickly had over 300 bottles without even drinking much of it. Now I just drink a bit before I buy more and then buy stuff that cost a bit more but interest me

• Don't even think of doing it alone - unless you live in the middle of nowhere or struggle being around people. Learning how to engage with your chemical senses requires learning from others.
• Education early on is good - do WSET L2 and L3 or equivalent, in person, asap: beyond giving you a solid foundation it helps you form one or more useful tasting groups.
• Write good notes, best in a digital format. Revisit them from time to time and reflect on them.
• Go broad before you go deep. Much of the beauty of wine is in its diversity.
• Taste blind, without prejudice, as much as possible.
• Be prepared to change your mind and to admit being wrong. A lot.
• "Why?" matters much more than "What?".

I loaded up my storage (I have room for about 150 bottles) with young wines that need age thinking it would be fun to have them to age over time. Now I wish I had the space and am happy to spend extra for things that are ready to drink now. Probably pretty common.

When you find a wine you really like, at a price you really like, buy as many as you can/find because chances are the next vintage will not be the same.

This is deeply true and even more so for folks who are new to working in the industry. There’s always going to be grail bottles that you missed out on trying, always going to be new restaurants opening, always going to be lots of trade events. You can’t do and taste everything and palate fatigue is real.

Yes! This was an early mistake of mine, too. Wasn't until I started reading about what should be aged, how it aged, how long it could age that I started being way more judicious. Ended up with some real stinkers, a lot of oxidized wines, lol. Tertiary notes and/or maderization aren't for everyone!

Depending on the budget, when I started, I didn't want to spend too much on it, but knew the importance of temperature control, which my apartment had none of. So I looked on FB marketplace fairly often and found a decent 30 bottle fridge really cheap. I suggest the same thing to my friends starting out.

Then try different things, talk to the folks at the wine shop, visit wine bars, etc.

To age wine you only need two things - a cool place with stable temperatures and a bottle of wine intended to age. For the cool place, your own basement or cellar is a good starting point. If you don't have one, perhaps family or friends do, otherwise there are paid storage facilities.

The tricky part is the wine. Most wine will not age well. The best wines to age are sweet wines such as Sauternes, Tokaji or Port. A good quality bottle of these from a good vintage will easily age for thirty years with no issue and fifty years is not uncommon. The second easiest wines to age are Riojas; they are also the cheapest red wines to age - a $20 Rioja in a good vintage can improve for fifteen years, and a $75 Rioja for forty. Even a relatively generic, mass-produced Rioja can be aged nicely! The third easiest is Bordeaux. Now you must be much more careful about the producer and the vintage, but even still you can find $50 Bordeaux that can improve for twenty years.

Beyond sweet wines, Riojas and Bordeaux, it takes more knowledge to understand which wines age well. This is a series of broad generalizations, but: most inexpensive wines, most wines aged in stainless steel, most dry white wines, and most mass-produced wines do not age well.

Now to your question... aging Pinot Noir for over, say, a decade is a bit tricky, because it is a rather expensive grape. To keep things simpler, you will want to look to Burgundy and plan to spend >$100/bottle.

Well, as a jumping off point for collecting, wine typically likes to sit at a temperature of 50 degrees to 60 degrees fahrenheit, and a relative humidity of 50 to 70 (keeping humidity constant is key). "Bigger" wines can usually age longer, but there are exceptions. As an example, good pinot noir has a sweet spot of 5-15 years aging, where as a good cab driven blend can easily age over 20 years (with 40 plus not being outlandish). If you want to age an collect, definitely look into either a wine fridge or cellar if you have deep pockets. I also would suggest a hygrometer to ensure humidity is consistent and within an acceptable range.

As far as collecting goes, I don't think there are rules. You can stick to a varietal or a region to begin with, and branch out as curiosity pushes boundaries. I personally suggest getting an armoa kit, so you can hone in on the notes you like in particular, and then see where else those notes are represented.

Maybe buy wines you like.

Well since you live in Germany - I would definitely start collecting some Riesling (Kabinett, GG, all the good stuff) :)

I would recommend getting some kind of wireless temperature/humidity sensor that connects to a smartphone so you can monitor the conditions in that cellar before you start laying down your collection.

Hard to answer your question without more Information. What wines do you Like? What Budget?

I would suggest trying wines and buying the one‘s you like. Read about them (for example how long you can or should cellar them etc.)

You want your collection to reflect the wine you like to drink. Being from Germany I would focus on German/European producers, generally a good rule to drink wine from your local area. Find small boutique wine shops in your area and talk to the staff. Attend wine tastings in your area and buy the wines you really enjoy.

I also recommend stocking up on cheaper 'drink soon' wines along with the ones you plan on aging. Often I've focused on buying exclusively premium wines for cellaring and ended up with a collection that you're only saving for a 'special occasion' with nothing to drink on the odd weeknight.

Also remember not every wine is meant to be aged and older doesn't always mean better. When cellaring a wine you want to have a rough idea on when it should be drunk.

First of all, condolences on your loss, and your dad was a cool guy to leave you a wine collection. My personal advice would be to go slow and use this as an opportunity to learn about wine. There’s no rush to drink through it all or figure it all out at once. Learning about wine takes time and rewards patience. There’s far too much to learn all at once. You dad likely spent years building up that collection and it could take years for you to learn about it in any depth. The cool thing is that if you go down this route, you’ll also in a way be learning more about your dad and what he loved.

Cellar Tracker is a great app where you can keep track of the collection and get a sense of how the community rates it (the tip top wines are usually around 95-96 pts on CT) and 91-94 is generally a good score. Note that this is going to be lower than “expert” ratings which tend to be inflated. Also check out wine-searcher.com, which will give you a sense of values and what is still available to be bought. Note that their prices are sometimes given for multiple bottles, but it will show the per-bottle cost in a smaller font on the right.

There aren’t enough resources online to learn about wine, in my opinion, but there are some okay YouTube videos and websites and books, depending on your level of interest. Again, if you’re relatively new to wine as a hobby, my advice would be to go slow and not worry too much.

And of course, as you start to get a sense of the values, open a bottle every now and then and see what you think! Cellar Tracker will give you a sense of which wines are in a good drinking window. If you do take the time to actually enter the wines into it as a database (and you don’t have to, of course, as it will take time) then you can even list the wines by “drink by” date. This is good as it shows you what is more urgent to drink sooner rather than later. Once a wine passes it’s ideal drinking window, it can start to deteriorate in quality.

If you want to take pictures with closer views of the labels, I’m sure many people here could help give you a quick sense of what’s in your collection and what’s valuable and good to drink sooner / later. The pictures here are too far away to tell what is there.

Good luck!

Sorry for your loss. You could download Cellar Tracker, it will help with getting some idea about what you have, and if he had any system about storage (eg: by location). You’ll need to pay if you want a $ value, but you can get user opinions for free.

Also if I buy a case of something, that means I liked it. So that’s a clue as to his tastes.

Celebrate that mans life and enjoy some of the best bottles to the absolute fullest. My first priority would be to go through every single wine and look at the ages of bottles, see what can keep going and what should be drank soon

So sorry for your loss.

I own a private gig on the side, organizing/digitalizing private home cellars and providing consultation. One of my clients recently passed, my final job was interpreting the cellar for his wife. It was an absolute honor; being able to see his cellar from that perspective was beyond humbling. Made me realize how much of a complete reflection a collection can be of one’s life. Cherish every bottle, as each one reflects a singular choice, memory, relationship, trip, business transaction or etc. that was solely his. Your father left you palpable evidence of the eternal imprint he left on this world.

As someone who recently lost my own father in the last couple of years, I am so so sorry for the grief you are feeling and will feel for years to come. May you have a bottle that perfectly pairs with each wave of emotion and every reminder of him.

ETA: pls shoot me a DM at any time if you have any questions or would like guidance on how to approach this, free of charge.

Have run my 1000 bottle vineyard for 21 years. DM me for practical matters.

Worked as a dining columnist for a newspaper. Exploring food made me want to explore the wines associated with those foods. I bought what I could afford and just worked my way to other wines. I didn't really worry about what directon I was going. I just knew I had to try more wines to build up my mental databank.

Wine drinking and winemaking are two entirely different beasts.

Ordering by the glass as much as I could, going to restaurants with good wine lists and asking the somm or knowledgeable server.

Went to my then girlfriend's family dinner. They got me hooked on crack, and now I can't quit. Started me on the good stuff grower Champagne, Grand Cru Burgundies, first growth Bordeaux, they kept plying me with things I couldn't possibly afford.

Now I gotta do... things... to chase that high.

Personally I’d start with kit winemaking just to learn the process; you’ll have to get the startup equipment either way, then you get a kit that comes with juice (skins if you want to spend a little extra but I’d start with a cheap one), and everything else you need to add. The instructions will keep you on rails and teach you the process and let you work out kinks.

I started by reading posts on this subreddit and it strangely worked out really well.

Do you have a local brew your own brew store nearby? If so, go there. They should have everything you need to get started and have knowledgeable staff there to help answer questions. I just started myself 6 months ago. I would start with getting these two things:

1. A wine making equipment kit (this should have all the equipment you need to make wine)

2. A wine kit (this is the actual wine you will make)

Definitely do not try to buy all the equipment one by one. If you do not have a store near you, try to find one on Amazon or some other site. I just googled “beginner wine making kit” and found some options. Looks like there is a kit branded by master vintner listed on several different sites. It’s a bit expensive ($200). The kit I got in a store was $150. But it does include some things mine did not: A wine thief, a test jar, cleaner, thermometers. So I can see why it’s $50 more than mine

I have been "home-vinting" for about a year, and I agree with the comments about using kits to start out. One thing I'll mention is that while wine is obviously supposed to age, I was very surprised with the difference between a fresh wine, a 1 month age, and a 1 year age. I used a Winexpert Classic Cab Sauvignon as my first kit, and went from mildly disappointed, to acceptable, to pleased in that aging timeframe. We likened the initial taste to Winking Owl, 1yr age to a $15-20 bottle.

Id start by looking at "City Steading Brews" on youtube. They have a couple really low equipment type things that are pretty simple. I started with them and made 3 gallons straight from bottled juices from the store to get used to the process and learn with.