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Trends in cellaring of wine - Printable Version

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- daverg - 06-21-2002

I am looking for market size and growth trend info as well as behavior statistics(avg. size of cellar, minimum/avg length held/bottle) for people who cellar wine. I have searched extensively on the internet including wine consumer and industry focused sites but have found nothing. Does anyone have an idea on possible sources short of commissioning a national consumer survey?


- Innkeeper - 06-21-2002

Hi Dave, welcome to the Wine Board. Don't know of any surveys, but if you start to take one, you will have to narrow your parameters. "People who cellar wine" include all sorts of folks. It includes "collectors" some of whom hardly or never drink wine. It includes people who don't "age" anything, but keep a "cellar" of some number of bottles that they hope to drink before they go bad. Most keep some portion of their cellar to age, and the rest as a temporary holding area. Some very serious wine drinkers don't keep any more wine in house than then can drink in a week or two. There are probably as many variations as there are collector/drinkers. Really don't know what the "averages" of all this is going to do for anybody. That's just my opinion, maybe others will be more helpful.


- hotwine - 06-21-2002

I agree, IK, there's probably very wide variation in "cellaring habits" among the wine-buying population. There are those who use a storage facility only to "rest" a wine for a few weeks after purchase, and there a few who buy premium juice suited for aging 20, 40, 60 years, and have adequate storage to do that. If a survey were to sample the habits of typical wine shop patrons, there would probably be a large percentage in the short-term group; but if the survey focused on buyers of wine futures, it would probably turn up a large segment of folks who were in it for the long haul. It would be possible to pre-determine the results of the survey by directing it at defined sub-populations within the overall group. An interviewer would need to determine which segment of the population best defined a given respondent, and then determine the length of time each respondent stored wine prior to consumption. It could get kind of complicated. And after all the data were compiled, what sort of validity could be assigned to it? How representative would be the respondents in relation to the total wine-buying public? Not an easy task to sort out.


- Thomas - 06-21-2002

I agree. If you are planning to offer a product to people for cellaring, the information you get will be quite difficult to qualify.


- Auburnwine - 06-22-2002

I have a dozen bottles in the crawl space under my house (and a hundred in the cabinet across from the dryer). Does either count as "cellaring"?

Very few are above the $20 mark, of course.


- Innkeeper - 06-22-2002

Hope it's well across from the dryer Auburn!