Sorry I’ve not been able to post in a few days.  Things have been pretty busy around The Scot household.  We’re planning a major Summer of Renovations and I will blog the shit out of the whole process.  Full disclosure: I was out on Monday night with a group of friends from work and didn’t get home until 3:30am Tuesday. I’m still recovering. More on that later.

The Scot loves his booze, especially wine.  I mean look at the tag cloud on the right!  So on Monday we headed over to The Fine Wine Reserve (FWR) and cracked a few* bottles.  The FWR is a fantastic business idea, and one that might actually save you money in the long run.  Now, cellaring wine is one of The Scot’s hobbies that doesn’t necessarily fit The QPR, there have to be exceptions to rules sometimes.  I mean the price per bottle of some wines can reach atmospheric levels and, let’s be honest, you’re going to drink them eventually.  The return on your investment is essentially $0 unless you buy Bordeaux Futures and sell a crapload in 10-20 years. While I’d love to get into this practice, I’m just not flush like that.  Seriously, the closest I’ve come to a $900 bottle of Mouton Rothschild is in the pages of a magazine.

So how does the FWR fit the QPR?

It’s all about preserving your investment.  Now many of you might be of the “the only good bottle of wine is an empty one” ilk.  If that’s you, just skip this part.  If you know that not all bottles should be consumed right away, that they need time in the bottle (sometimes several years), to mature then this is what you need.  The FWR is a secure, environmentally controlled environment for your wine.  You rent lockers on a monthly basis and store the good stuff there.  It’s ‘open’ 24/7 so you can get what you want, when you want it.  There’s even an elegant ‘tasting room’ that you can reserve (included in with your fees) and conduct tastings,meetings, gatherings whatever.

Wine and a little B&D?

Right, the QPR…

So imagine you have 50-60 bottles of wine that need to be cellared.  Let’s say the retail value of your investment is over $2000 and you don’t have a professionally built, insured, secure cellar at home. It’s just a bad idea to keep that stuff in an environment such as your damp basement, or under the stairs.  So it’s been sitting in your basement all this time, maybe it’s gone through a few location changes, a move or two, and it’s time to start drinking that case of Lafite you’ve been ‘storing’. Great, but it tasts like shit!  What happend?!  Those $90 bottles of wine are worthless.  Believe it or not the quality of your wine over time can be adversely affected by swings in temperature, light, and even humidity, over time.   Cellar that stuff at a facility like the FWR and can almost guarantee that your wine will be, um, fine!  In fact, if you decide to sell a few bottles the fact that they were cellared properly can add significant value to them!

So sometimes it’s worth spending a bit to preserve future value.

Oh, and about that expensive Bordeaux stuff?  Stay tuned. I’m writing a piece on what I think the world of French wine will look like later this year and into 2010.  Here’s a hint — a  lot of good deals to be had.  Combine the fact that world wide consumption of wine is down, measurably, for the first time in years and that Bordeaux is flooded with cheap wine that they can’t sell makes for a buyers market!

Oh, and all of that wine consumption makes for an interesting commute to work the following morning.  What goes down, tends to come up and at the most inopportune times.  I’ll leave the rest of that story to your imagination.

* = 7 for 6 people.  Uh oh!