How to Start a Fine Wine Collection: A Practical Guide

Most advice on starting a wine collection begins with famous labels. Ours begins with a question: what do you actually drink? A cellar built around your table gets opened and enjoyed. A cellar built around a points list gathers dust — expensively.

Start with how you drink

Before buying a single case, write down the last ten bottles you genuinely loved. That list tells you more than any critic. If eight of them were white Burgundy, your first cellar should not be half Napa Cabernet. Collect forward from your own palate — you can broaden later.

The 60/30/10 rule

A useful starting structure for a first cellar:

• 60% drinking wines — bottles for tonight and this year. Village Burgundy, cru Beaujolais, Chianti Classico, Loire whites, grower Champagne. The wines that make a cellar a living thing rather than a museum.
• 30% keepers — wines that reward five to ten years: classed-growth Bordeaux, premier cru Burgundy, Barolo, northern Rhône Syrah, top German Riesling.
• 10% trophies — the bottles that will astonish you at ten years and beyond. First growths, grand cru Burgundy, vintage Champagne, cult California. Bought carefully, from allocation where possible.

What the money builds

Rough, honest numbers from our own proposals:

• €5,000 — a serious drinking cellar: 15–20 cases spanning France and Italy, with two or three keepers seeded in.
• €20,000 — a genuine collection: depth in two or three regions you love, verticals begun, proper trophy bottles, large formats for occasions.
• €100,000 — a cellar that needs a plan: allocations, en primeur positions, professional storage and documented provenance throughout.

Provenance from day one

The single most common mistake new collectors make is buying old bottles from unknown storage. A €500 bottle that spent three summers in a Provence garage is a €50 bottle with good handwriting. Buy from merchants who can tell you where the wine has been — and store what you buy properly from the first case. Our climate-controlled storage costs €24 per case per year; one ruined case costs more.

Use your merchant's allocation network

The wines that appreciate — and the ones that make a cellar sing — are mostly allocated: top Burgundy, first growths, prestige and grower Champagne, cult California. You cannot buy them by wanting them; you buy them through relationships. This is where a merchant earns their keep. We supply Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Pétrus, Krug Clos d'Ambonnay and Screaming Eagle to superyachts — the same network works for private collectors.

Three rules to keep

Buy in threes or sixes, not singles — you'll want to watch wines evolve. Keep a simple record from the start; future-you will be grateful. And drink your wine — the saddest cellars we value are the ones where everything was saved for an occasion that never quite came.

Ready to start? Talk to our team — tell us what you drink and what you'd like to spend, and we'll propose a first cellar with exact bottles and prices.