The Philosophy of the D’Aquila-Phillips Wine Cellar
There were several forces and reasons, which influenced the creation of the DP Wine Cellar. First there was the shared abiding love of my best half’s Italian heritage. This impacted me significantly since I was the first ever non-Italian to marry into the family! A wonderful couples wedding shower. A willingness by my wife to patiently teach me there was more to wine than 99¢ bottles of Ripple. A mid-marriage, decade’s long love affair with Merlot (after an intense, but shorter lived love affair with vodka gimlets). The serendipitous discovery of the beauty of red wines by an adult daughter played a role. Then all this topped off with a late in life promise requested of me by my best half. More on each of these forces in the future.
At this point, suffice it to say as I accepted each of these forces in my life the concept of developing the DP Wine Cellar became more and more of an important piece of my life. Slow in its creation, but once begun I realized very quickly I needed to have an operating philosophy for our cellar or the DP Wine Cellar would be running me rather than vice versa.
After all unless your wallet in far fatter than mine you can’t do it all when it comes to wine. Equally if you don’t focus it somehow, your cellar can end up an unmanageable mishmash and far less understandable. Not that our philosophy is anything special or what anyone else might choose to do, but here is how we decided to organize, focus, and operate.
From the start, we established our cellar and stock our racks by following the following:
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D’Aquila-Phillips Wine Cellar
Operating Philosophy
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- Focus our Cellar holdings on wines from Napa Valley, with smaller compliments from Italy, France, and Chile, as originally decided.
a. Present Holdings:* Napa 86%; Italy 7%; France 6%; Chile 1%.
- Capture a majority of future Cellar holdings via Club offerings and/or Allocations.
- Concentrate any non-club/non-allocation increases on wines from smaller, family-owned, high-reputation vineyards.
- Don’t buy less than four bottles of anything, nor fewer than two magnums. Our preference is to case or ½ case purchases.
- Buy with our head and not our heart. Mostly!
- Work toward holding 75% Cellar Dweller wines and 25% drink now wines.
- Focus on the ‘5-W’ factor. If a wine can be commonly purchased from liquor and/or grocery stores there is no reason to buy it and have them take up space in our Cellar.
* As of June 2019
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You might be asking why we would pursue such a philosophy for our wine cellar.
Let me explain.
1) Our geographic focus is based purely on family history combined with the fact, as I said, we do not have an unlimited wallet so we have to focus somehow. We have a generations-old family tie to Napa Valley wines, my better half was 100% Italian, our daughter loves French Bordeaux’s, and I lived for a year in Chile and there developed an early love of Concha y Toro wines. While we fully realize there are many, many very fine wines from other locations, we know we can’t cover the earth, so we have to limit ourselves and so we do it this way.
2) Why use Clubs and Allocations? Two reasons. First, money! Every Wine Club we belong to offers wonderful discounts and other benefits to its members. Some discount as high as 30% with more and more offering free or greatly reduced shipping. Second, more often than not with smaller producers the only way to have access to their wines and any special, or library, offerings, is to make your way into their allocation process. (I’m still hanging out waiting for over three years now on a couple of them.)
3) We acknowledge we want to grow beyond our current holdings and often this entrails the dreaded ‘Wait List’ especially in Napa Valley. Understanding early we could often live on the wrong side of anyone’s Wait List for years, we began signing up in the hope we will, within our lifetime, leave the dark side and join the lucky ones to gain access. If not, perhaps our next generation of cellar owners will.
4) In our earliest years we made more than a few strategic mistakes by buying a single bottle of wine and of course drinking it! Then we’d find we loved it, but by the time we returned for more it was either sold out or the price had elevated outside our comfort zone. So we now we do our best to ‘buy in bulk’!
5) We study, study, and study any wine prior to our decision to purchase. We try not to be enticed by fancy labels or over the top marketing. As I like to remind our family “You don’t drink marketing”! So we truly try our best to buy with our heads and not our hearts. But, to be honest, every once in a while our hearts do get involved, especially when it comes to Mondavi family wines. Good thing they make some truly great wines!
6) We try to maintain a balance between those wines we buy for cellaring purposes/aging for the future versus those we buy with the intent to drink now. Our general goal is to keep the cellaring wines at somewhere around 75% of the cellar and the ‘drink now’ wines at 25%. This helps us not let any wines age beyond their peak. This is also one of the reasons we are avid fans and super users of CellarTracker software for our cellar. After all, wine is a terrible thing to waste!
7) We aim for a 5-W factor for our Cellars. We want our guests to look through our Cellars and ask the classic ‘5-W’ questions of journalism! We didn’t want a cellar where anyone would walk in and see the same wines they see on their visits to the liquor, grocery, or state store. Plus if you can pick it up locally we don’t need to have it take up space in our cellars. As our guests peruse our cellars we want them to ask “Who is this vintner?” “What can you tell me about this wine?” “Where is this winery?” “When did you find this winery?” and of course “Why did you pick this wine for your cellar?”
So there you have it. The philosophy under which we established the DP Wine Cellar and we follow each and every day.
Salud!
Salude!
Na Zdraví!
L’chaim!
Cheers!