The Bordeaux Wine Magazine 2023 December issue by the Bordeaux Wine Experience, the leading Bordeaux Wine Tour Company
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This Magazine was shared with you as a member of
our select circle of Bordeaux-lovers
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Chateau Margaux has a beautiful collection of older vintages…
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A Personal Note From Ronald,
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With the Holiday season just around the corner, I decided to let you in on my vision on creating a wine cellar.
I added my personal experiences and even some of my errors.
I hope this article will inspire you to derive even more pleasure from this exciting hobby of establishing your own wine collection.
40 years of experience
Especially because collecting wines has been my passion that has given me so much pleasure for almost 40 years now.
Writing about building a wine cellar, I realized that there is so much to tell about this fascinating subject.
And it brought back so many great memories of my own experience of building my collection.
It’s a lot to take in, therefore, this will be the first in a series about cellaring an ageing those beautiful Bordeaux wines. I hope you enjoy reading this.
And please hit reply to let me know if you have any questions or comments, as I would love to hear from you and get your feedback.
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Ronald enjoys sharing bottles form his cellar with his guests
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And how about your collection?
Apart from this feedback, I would love to hear about your own collection.
It would be great if my Magazine could show some pictures and stories of cellars of some of our readers.
So, sending me a few pictures would be much appreciated.
Preferably with a few words about your collection or how you got into setting up your collection.
Simply hit reply, and maybe your cellar will be featured soon in this Magazine.
Of course, we will respect your privacy if you prefer.
See and tastes wines from my cellar
If you join one of our Bordeaux Wine Tours, you can experience my personal wine collection with your own eyes.
And I’ll throw in lots of stories about my passion for Bordeaux.
You can even taste wines that have been ageing in my cellar, sometimes for decades.
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Your cellar doesn’t have to look like this to be featured
(Here at Pichon Baron)
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Join us in 2024
You can join us in Bordeaux on one of our Wine Experiences.
We still have a few rooms for the September 2024 Bordeaux Grand Cru Harvest Tour.
Travel suggestions
In this issue I have some alternative options for you to come to Bordeaux to discover.
And I have a tip for Santa
A Bordeaux Wine Tour makes a great gift as well.
And you get to enjoy the experience yourself as well. Maybe a hint for a Christmas stocking?
Ask us for an Itinerary here and discover why so many guests keep coming back to us again and again.
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Ronald and Margaret love welcoming you in Bordeaux
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And please remember: don’t drink anything I wouldn’t drink!
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Discover Youtube Channel:
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All roads lead to Bordeaux…
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You can easily skip Paris, coming to Bordeaux
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OK, maybe not all roads…
But there are so many possibilities to fly from North America or Australia to Bordeaux than just through Paris alone.
One of our guests, who had enrolled for one of our Bordeaux Harvest Tours pointed out that at some dates flights to Paris were expensive because of the Olympics.
Smart as they were, they booked flights through London that were much more affordable. And they get to see the shows in London plus Buckingham Palace…
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So many options to fly to Europe
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And why not Amsterdam?
In the past we recommended a few of our return guests, who had been in Paris many times, to fly in through Amsterdam.
Seeing Rembrandt and Van Gogh and maybe enjoying some other Dutch delights, can make a nice interlude before coming to Bordeaux.
As you can see on the picture above, there are many flights by different airlines into Bordeaux from all over Europe.
European budget airlines give you even more options, and are very doable for short trips.
All this to say that you don’t have to be discouraged by the Olympics in Paris to come to Bordeaux this year.
Need any help or suggestions?
Just shoot Margaret a quick email as she would love to help.
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The adventure of creating your wine cellar
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Some cellars are used for tasting with our guests
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One of the things I have been wanting to write about for a long time is the adventure of building and owning a wine cellar.
A wine cellar simply is a room, or a fridge dedicated to the storing an ageing of wines.
The storing conditions in a cellar are very important for the ageing of your precious bottles. In a next issue of the magazine, I will delve into the more technical aspects of the storing conditions for your collection.
Today it’s about my vision and experience getting my collection started.
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Creating your wine cellar
Building a wine collection is not complicated.
As I explain to my guests on our tours, founding a cellar is basically the same as creating a fortune.
The key rule is astonishingly simple: Spend less money than you earn, and you become richer.
If you spend more than you bring in, you grow poorer.
Same old, same old with your cellar
When you buy more bottles than you drink, your collection grows.
When you consume more than you buy, the content of your cellar goes down.
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Balance is the key
Like money, your cellar faces a similar challenge:
There is no point in being the richest guy on the cemetery.
But spending all your money like there is no tomorrow is no solution either.
Because when tomorrow does come, it is nice to have some money left…
I think you get the point: the key word here is balance.
For your cellar the same rule applies. There is no point building a cellar with so many bottles that you physically never will be able to drink them all.
Or with too many bottles that will all peak at the same time. Younger people who, like me, prefer older wines simply must buy more bottles than they drink; at least for a while.
There is good news for people of my age and up: We can’t un-ring a bell, but we can buy older wines.
And that’s what I still do. But these are more expensive and there can be doubts about provenance and storage.
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Storing wines give you the advantage of drinking mature
bottles like my Ducru Beaucaillou 1958
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Why have a wine cellar?
Believe it or not, but this is a question I get a lot.
The answer is both simple and complicated at the same time.
So, let’s start with the simple reason. When you have a well-stocked wine cellar you have something to choose from.
You can try different vintages, producers, wine regions, or even wines from different countries.
Ageing wines
The second reason is to age your wines.
Wines, especially the better Bordeaux wines, will evolve over time: They change, and most will improve!
One of the mysteries of Bordeaux is how some wines can age and others won’t.
On our tours I always make sure that our guests experience both recent vintages and quite a few bottles that have some age on them.
Click here for a full list of wines we tasted on previous Bordeaux Wine Tours.
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An outstanding 2016 can give much pleasure too
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Patience will be rewarded
Our guests enjoy finding out which phase of the development of the wines they like the most.
Especially if they haven’t had much experience with older Bordeaux wines.
On our tours expect to taste many bottles with more than 20 years on them and some even of 30 or 40 years old.
All this is important because there are no rules here: if you prefer your wines younger, drink them younger.
If you are like me and prefer aged wines; you’ll either need lots of patience or deep pockets.
I will write a special issue of the Magazine about the ageing of Bordeaux wines.
But back to the cellar
If you prefer wines young, there is no purpose laying down thousands of bottles.
In that case, just store what you predict to drink in the next 3-4 years.
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But patience can be so rewarding, like with the ’82
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The budget paradox
There is a big budget dilemma when you are creating a wine collection with the purpose of ageing your bottles a few decades.
Most people that start a wine collection for this purpose are younger.
But as we grow older, we don’t even buy green bananas.
For that reason, I personally stopped buying futures a few years ago…
Anyway, I remember when I as a young guy started buying wines for my cellar.
This was almost 40 years ago, and in the beginning of my career.
Margaret and I were just out of university and by far not on the same budget as we are now.
When I started out with my cellar, we also had to buy stupid things like a washing machine and a couch and the like.
You get the point:
My first impulse was not to run to the wine store and order a few cases of First Growths, so to speak.
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The cork screw is the greatest enemy of your wine collection
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With the distinct advantage of hindsight
Not buying those First Growths was a stupid mistake, by the way, as an example may show:
I remember my first purchase of Chateau Mouton Rothschild on futures.
I recall paying 75 Dutch Guilders (€ 34 or 36 US$) per bottle.
All my friends (and even my darling wife) thought that I had gone completely out of my mind: buying two cases of 12 bottles each of these incredibly expensive wines.
Considering today’s prices, I rest my case… (pun intended!).
Do I have any regrets? No of course not.
Yes, I should have bought much more of the 1982 etc.
But we all should have bought more Apple, and Amazon, etc.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
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Ronald’s first cellar in the Netherlands
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Not everyday is Christmas, but sometimes it is
The next step is predicting your future consumption.
And that is not always easy as predicting future wine consumption is difficult.
But your cellar strategy should include future highlights.
A couple of examples: Exceptional wines from outstanding vintages, especially with a great ageing potential, will give you much joy when they come of age, sometimes after decades.
Collecting wines from memorable vintages is also great fun.
Your birth year or the vintage in which you were married for instance. Remember how I celebrated my 65th birthday with a Ducru Beaucaillou 1958?
Wines from the years your children were born deserve a spot in you cellar as well.
What fun to celebrate their 21st birthday with a wine from their birth year!
And what about your 2050 Christmas dinner?
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Wines of he birth years of our sons are treasures in my cellar
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Lessons learned
Buying special bottles for future special moments is something that I would have done differently in hindsight.
I would have bought (even) more of these special bottles.
Quantity vs quality
Starting a cellar, you are faced with the quantity vs quality question.
Entering your cellar, you don’t want to just find your 6 or 12 famous bottles that you are going to drink in 25 years’ time.
When you start building your collection you want some bottles to fill up your cellar as well.
On top of that you want something you can drink tonight as well.
My wine-loving and thirsty friends couldn’t have agreed more.
I will expand on this a little more.
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Large format bottles can be very festive as well
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Protecting the motherload
The most dangerous challenge to your cellar is your corkscrew…
When you have friends over, you can’t run out of wine, especially when they know that you have a cellar.
My strategy was to protect my special bottles with a thick layer of more affordable wines.
At the time we were still living in the Netherlands.
At a local shop I found two very nice and extremely affordable Bordeaux wines from the Cotes de Bourg appellation.
Wines that were drinking well young, but with some decent aging potential.
I would buy cases of these every year thus creating a little vertical in my new cellar.
My friends were, just like Margaret and I, fresh out of university.
With them we could down an incredible number of bottles.
And with my pleasantly drinking Cotes de Bourg wines we didn’t break the bank.
And we didn’t blow a hole in my stock of more special wines.
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Some chateaux have great selections of older wines
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No snobs, just good taste
A funny story springs to mind.
When we had just moved to our Chateau near Bordeaux, we found a bottle of the same Cotes de Bourg in a local shop.
We had moved on a bit in life since the old days and were used to drinking more expensive wines by then.
Out of curiosity we bought a bottle of the Chateau du Bousquet 2000, Cotes de Bourg.
This was the same wine we enjoyed so much in the old days.
And the same wine that so faithfully protected my better wines from the dangers of the corkscrew.
We were curious to discover whether we had become snobs. Or that our tastebuds back then were wronged by our rudimentary wine experiences of the old days.
The funny thing was that we both still enjoyed this wine.
Our tastebuds were already fine back then; they are just a bit more developed now.
I remember buying a few cases of the 2000 and later the 2005 as daily drinkers…
About selecting wines with an ageing potential, I will also get back to you in a future issue of this magazine.
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I’ve still got a 3 liter bottle of our affordable Cotes de Bourg
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Like a tree
In the meantime, I do hope that I have inspired you to start or continue your wine collection.
If you haven’t started your collection yet, then I have a nice comparison for you:
You know what they say about the right time to plant a tree?
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now!
The same rule applies to your wine collection.
I do wish you a lot of fun on your future wine adventures.
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Just make sure that you get started
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The entrance to Ronald’s wine museum
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Our 2024 Bordeaux Wine Tour Program
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An experience you will never forget: tasting First Growths in the dining room of our own Chateau Coulon Laurensac
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The Bordeaux Grand Cru Harvest Tour
The Harvest Tour is Grand in every way, both in food and wine. Enjoy chateau meals and Exclusive dining.
The most exciting time in Bordeaux is harvest time. You can sense the anticipation in the air.
And the food is superb as well: Exclusive meals at extraordinary venues not normally open to the public.
On top of that you’ll taste all five First Growths plus Superior First Growth Chateau d’Yquem and many of them will be older vintages!
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Experience Bordeaux in full harvest swing
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A master-class on tasting Classified Growths marks
the start of each of our Bordeaux Wine Tours
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The Bordeaux Grand Cru tour
This is probably our most exclusive tour. This ultimate wine tour for Bordeaux lovers is as good as it gets.
Can you believe that you’ll taste all five First Growths plus Superior First Growth Chateau d’Yquem including some older vintages! Of course we include the best of Saint Emilion and Pomerol as well.
Add to this outstanding meals at exceptional venues not normally open to the public and you’ll see why this tour usually sells out early.
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2024 Bordeaux Wine Tour Schedule
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What makes our Bordeaux Wine and Culinary Tours so special?
- Exclusive touring: limited to six double/twin rooms and one single
- Carefree and truly effortless travel in Bordeaux: We take care of everything, really everything
- Taste all 5 First Growths and Château Yquem!
- Expert (and humorous) guidance by Bordeaux specialist Ronald Rens and his team
- Air-conditioned accommodation at our privately owned 18th Century chateau
- Taste more Classified Growths than on any other Bordeaux wine tour!
- Grand Cru Farewell Dinner with all Grand Cru wines (including Chateau d’Yquem!)
- Gourmet meals at Bordeaux Chateaux and venues not normally open to the public!
- Grand Cru wines with all meals (except breakfast…)
- Air-conditioned, luxury motor coach transportation throughout the tour
- Great food and wine and a lot of fun in a small group
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Chateau Coulon Laurensac, without a doubt the best place in the world to have fun and
taste all five First Growths plus Yquem…
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The Bordeaux Wine Experience
at Chateau Coulon Laurensac
1, chemin de Meydieu
33360 Latresne (BORDEAUX), France
Website : www.BXWINEX.com
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Call us:
1-877-203-2665 (toll free from USA & Canada) or
+33 556 20 64 12 (from anywhere else in the world)
(These lines go directly to our Chateau in Bordeaux so please remember that we’re on Paris time!)
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Copyright 2023 by The Bordeaux Wine Experience. All rights reserved. The content, design and graphical elements of this Magazine are copyrighted. The Bordeaux Wine Experience is a Dutch company specializing in wine and culinary tours in the Bordeaux region for an English speaking international clientele.
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