BF2S Forums Any other wine nerds here? 10 questions for you...

Well, I'm working for my dad and we went to this guys house who got flooded to clear stuff out and list it for the insurance company. Their was a vintage bottle of 1945 port in their which he bought for £400 30 years ago. ruined by flood water

1. How many bottles in your collection? : Dunno - I drink them on a regular basis. Only a few get set aside for special occasions. I don't collect wine - that's for pansies. I drink it. I will certainly set special bottles aside for special occasions, but they all get drunk eventually.

2. What's the mix (% of Cab, Bordeaux, Cal. meritage, Burgundy, etc.)? : Quite an assortment. I'm a big fan of white Burgundys though, have a few bottle of Mersault and Chablis Premier Cru knocking about. Quite a few bottles of Shiraz too and a few tasty Bordeauxs from my last trip to St Emilion - though the prices in St Emilion tend to be a bit on the steep side.

3. What's the most expensive bottle in the cellar? : 1950 Chateau Latour - present from my Dad. He got a case of it given to him, 'cos that's the year he was born. I did have two - I've drunk one. It was very nice.

4. If that's not also the most rare, what is most rare? That probably is the most rare, purely down to its age.

5. What's the best bottle in the cellar (your personal choice for what will be best), and you can give us a top 5 or 10.

6. Best bottle you've ever had, and give us a top 5 or 10 if you want: Tough one....

7. The setting when you drank that best bottle and do you think that altered your perception of it? Again, not sure.

8. Where do you buy most of your wine? I buy ALL of my wine in France - it's about 3 or 4 times cheaper. Got a good little place I go to in St Omer. Dijon is great for picking stuff up and I used to know a guy called Rene who had a vinyard in Beaujolais, used to buy a few boxes of Noveau of him most years - but he died quite recently, so no more cheap Beaujolais .

9. What kind of cellar do you have? A crap one.

10. Where are you going from here with your wine? What do you mean? I'm going to drink it of course.

Wine can be replaced by insurance. I have mine "rated" which doesn't mean a wine rating, it means it's added to your rate. The annual cost is about 50 cents per $100 of wine, or it may be 50 cents per 1,000. Either way I definitely got mine done. When one bottle can be worth a few grand, a power outage or flood could be financially crippling. If you have more than $25k worth of wine you should DEFINITELY call your insurance agent...