Short answer: the question is what a man with 20,000 bottles in a Woodside basement knew that the rest of us don’t, and the answer is that he didn’t buy wine to get rich. He bought it to drink, he kept records like an engineer, and the part he never got to drink sold for $3.23 million this June. The lesson is not the money. The lesson is that a collection is a schedule, and most of us don’t keep one.
Here is the story, and then the part that matters for your six bottles.
The basement in Woodside
In 1964 a young electrical engineer out of Princeton moved to California to work at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, back when HP was about to build its first computer. On weekends he drove up to Ridge Vineyards and over to see his friend Joe Heitz, whose Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet was about to become the most famous wine in America. In 1972 he became one of Kermit Lynch’s first customers, which is how a Californian ended up buying Rousseau and Dujac by the case for roughly $50 a bottle.
He kept buying for sixty years. He converted a bathroom into storage. He laminated every label and filed it. At the high water mark the collection ran to something like 20,000 bottles in a basement in Woodside.
He died in 2025. What remained, 6,814 bottles, went to Christie’s at Rockefeller Center on June 5 and brought $3.23 million, 132 percent above the low estimate. Six bottles of Roumier Bonnes-Mares 1971 made $100,000. Eleven bottles of La Tâche 1990 made $100,000. A case of Dujac Clos Saint-Denis 1985, estimated at $60,000, made $93,750. Rousseau Clos de Bèze 1985, $81,250. Eight bottles of Heitz Martha’s 1974, $30,000. Six of Stag’s Leap S.L.V. 1973, the vintage that beat Bordeaux in Paris, $25,000. There were twenty vintages of Martha’s going back to 1973, Inglenook from the sixties, Mayacamas 1974, Freemark Abbey 1969, and a case of Monte Bello 1974 that the catalogue put at $22,000 to $32,000.
Chris Munro, who runs wine for Christie’s in America, said it plainly: this was bought “not for investment, but for the joy of sharing great wine.”
The number nobody printed
Do the arithmetic the auction house didn’t. If the peak really was 20,000 bottles and 6,814 were left, then something like thirteen thousand bottles went down the hatch, or across the table to friends, over sixty years. That is roughly four bottles a week for an adult lifetime. The sale was the leftover, not the achievement.
And look at what was left. A 1971 Bonnes-Mares is fifty-five years old. A 1985 Clos Saint-Denis is forty-one. These are wines at the far edge of their lives, and some of them are past it. The people who paid $100,000 for six bottles were paying for the story and the provenance, and they know perfectly well that a few of those corks will give them vinegar and a memory. Nobody in that room was buying a drinking window. He had already drunk the good part.
That is the thing I want you to take from this. The man was not a hoarder. He was a drinker with a long runway, and the collection grew because he bought faster than he could pour, which is the one mistake every serious buyer makes, from Woodside basements down to the six bottles on your kitchen counter.
What this means for your six bottles
You are not going to buy Rousseau by the case for $50. That ship sailed in 1972. But the two questions he answered every week are the same two questions you have, and most people never ask them.
When is this bottle at its best? Not “is it good,” but “is it good now.” The $18 Côtes du Rhône you bought in March is at its best this year, and you are not improving it by waiting. The Barolo someone gave you for your fortieth is probably sleeping for another five. The Napa Cabernet from 2014 is right in the middle of its window and will be for a while. Every bottle has a window, and the window is almost never “whenever I get around to it.”
How many do I have in the window right now? This is where the laminated labels come in. He could answer that question because he filed every label by hand for sixty years. You can answer it one bottle at a time with a photo of the label, which is what I do for a living, and which takes about four seconds a bottle. The point is not the method. The point is that you cannot drink in the window if you don’t know what’s in it.
Most wine sold in the world is meant to be drunk within five years of the vintage, and most of it is better at two than at five. If you own six bottles and three of them are quietly going over the hill while you save them for a special occasion, you have the Woodside problem at one thousandth the scale. The special occasion is Tuesday. Open one.
The buying lesson
He bought what he loved, young, from people he knew, in quantities he intended to drink. He did not buy what the critics scored. He bought what Joe Heitz poured him on a Saturday. Decades later the market agreed with him, but that was never the plan, and if it had been the plan he would have sold in 1995 and missed the best twenty years of drinking.
So buy young, buy what you like, buy a little more than one bottle of it so you can watch it change, and write down when to open it. The writing down is the whole game. Christie’s didn’t sell his wine for $3.23 million because it was expensive. They sold it because every bottle came with a record of where it had been since the day it arrived.
You do not need a basement. You need the record.
Winey
Winey is the sommelier inside Winosseur, the iPhone app that reads a bottle from a photo and tells you whether it is worth the money and when to open it.
https://apps.apple.com/app/winosseur/id6759776756
Sources: the Drinks Business preview of the sale and results, and the Times of India profile of the collector.