Tag Archives: Still Stupid at Sixty

Wine writing update

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First and foremost, SAZ in the Cellar is a wine resource site.  It is my intent to blog about wine, share ideas on enjoying and appreciating wine, and provide links to other resources on wine.  I believe my upcoming book, Wine Sense(s), fits into that concept.  Therefore, I will be providing the occasional update on the status of Wine Senses(s) and post on other wine writing.  I will also provide reviews and links to other wine blogs and books that I find useful and expect you will enjoy to broaden your wine reading.  Over time, the Resources page and sub-pages on this website will provide references to other wine blogs and books, and wine-related products and services that hopefully will be of interest.

But the focus of my blog posts will continue to be on wine tasting and enjoyment.  We will review wines, match wines with food and also provide useful tips for buying wine, storing wine and most importantly, drinking wine.  These ideas are being consolidated into the book and should provide you with a great read in the coming months.  I have found that in blogging about wine and then researching and writing a book on wine that I learned a great deal – much more Continue reading →

Wine blogging or wine book writing?

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Many people have asked why I have not been releasing as many blog posts in the last few months.  I used to post about 10 – 15 per month, but have only posted twice now in the last month.  I apologize for that and need to get more diligent.  But there is good cause as I have been very focused on getting my first wine book published.  This has been a far larger effort than my previous book Still Stupid at Sixty which I wrote under the pseudonym, Blake Stevens.  It was a great experience and I learned a lot about the electronic publishing industry.  But that was a tale that I needed to write, not a book that I hope influences a much larger audience.

I have written about 300 pages so far and expect the wine book will end up between 350 – 375 pages.  I am putting a heavy-duty effort into finalizing my research and restructuring the book to make it more readable and accessible.  I am really excited about the book and hope it reaches a wide audience that will enjoy and benefit from it.  My last book was only published in electronic format and limited to Kindle mobi format (which has about 90% of sales for authors electronically).  My wine book will be published both electronically (in a number of different formats) and in printed form and will have a number of photographs.  It will also have video links using QR Codes.  The photography and video components adds a great deal of work to the effort, but is well worth it.

My last book was a personal tale so I did not need to do any research or citation of references.  My wine book will have a substantial bibliography and set of footnotes and endnotes.  This is another dimension of why the wine book requires much more effort than my first book did.

Note taking in Evernote

I had been writing the book in Word, but have now converted the Work In Process (WIP) to Scrivener which is an authoring management system.  I am also using Evernote for collecting research and clipping notes.  Both are brilliant applications which have really increased my productivity.  I review my sources, enter comments into Evernote on my iPad (see picture), then cut and paste into the correct section in Scrivener.  This has really helped me to improve the organization and structure of the book.  It has also provided me a vehicle to do much more electronically instead of working with paper to-do lists and a multitude of different files, notebooks, Post-It tabs, margin writing, etc. Additionally, I am learning HTML and CSS to be able to better understand and control the final output of the books even though I will have a professional designer work with me to accomplish that.

However, all of the book writing and coming up to speed with new applications (great as they are!) on top of working a full-time job has limited my desire and ability to blog, and for that I apologize.  I am flattered that a number of people have been querying my whereabouts and look forward to my posts!  And I want to let you know that I will be blogging much more over the next month again.  I will do limited writing on my wine book, but much reading and research and restructuring of the book before I get into doing a significant rewrite in about four to six weeks time.  This will leave more energy over the next month for blogging.  Plus I will extract a number of the basic concepts from the book and use those to create blog posts and to start to introduce you to the book.

Thank you so much for your support!  I really appreciate it and hope you will become as interested in my wine book as you are my wine blog.  I will release some ‘teasers’ along the way as each section of the book is further developed.

We had a tremendous time in the Hunter Valley, meeting with some wine makers and cellar door friends, and also meeting some new great chefs around the region.  It was so wonderful to have two solid weeks of vacation to do a major restructuring of the wine book, but my blogging has suffered due to my dedication and focus to the book.  I will try to keep both better balanced while I am finishing off the book.  I promise each of my three blogs will receive more attention.

Thanks again for your support and interest, and keep drinking well!

 

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2013.  Steve Shipley
SAZ in the Cellar on Facebook
Wine Pinterest Boards
Twitter:  Steve Shipley @shipleyaust;   InkIT Publishing @inkitpub

My new book “Wine Sense”

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I have been blogging less recently as my writing efforts have been focused on my full-time job and a book on wine.  I am very excited and have the book well structured, have written about 20,000 words and expect the book to be 75,000 – 100,000 words in length.  This has had an impact though by reducing the time and energy for blogging.

I originally was writing a blog post on how to appreciate wine and how wine interacts with the human senses, but it quickly grew to several thousand words without being close to complete.  I thought about segmenting it into a series of blog posts, but even that would have been a lengthy serial.  Therefore, I decided to turn it into a book which I am thinking of calling Wine Sense.  The book is well structured and I am about a quarter complete with the first draft.  I am taking a four-day long weekend over ANZAC Day week after next, and taking two weeks off from my day job in July to focus on competing the first draft.  I am getting about 3,000 – 4,000 words written per weekend, and when focused, I can write 5,000 words per day.  Therefore, I am pretty comfortable to have a first draft complete by end of July.

But then the real work begins providing sources, footnotes, links to other resources, and finding 50 – 75 pictures to include.  Then re-writing, editing, and formatting for electronic publishing.  This may take an additional 4 – 6 months.

I think Wine Sense will serve a real purpose and be of interest to a large audience.  I have read a number of books on wine appreciation, wine tasting, and the philosophy of wine, and I believe my book will fit into a nice middle ground and be of use for the novice and experienced wine drinker alike.  It will offer pragmatic advice as to why and how to to learn to enjoy and appreciate wine drinking, and to provide you with confidence and the ability to drink far better wines on a reasonable budget.

I wrote my first book Still Stupid at Sixty a year ago under the pseudonym Blake Stevens.  I have received good feedback on Still Stupid at Sixty plus learned a lot about book writing and publishing.  That effort was 75,000 words and a book I had to write.  It was only published independently and electronically and can be found on Amazon.  My book Wine Sense will be published in both physical and electronic format and I am considering using a traditional publishing house.  I love writing and am passionate about wine, so it is a good combination.

I have turned my life around financially in the last few years as presented in Still Stupid at Sixty, and am now far better off and moving on.  I present it as a gift (and at $3.99, the book truly is a gift!) for others to learn from my mistakes and what to do to avoid making them.

Therefore, I will be publishing a few less blog posts over the next few months, but also taking some excerpts from my new book as preludes and hopefully to get some good feedback on the concepts before final publishing.

I love drinking wine and writing about wine and looking forward to sharing that with you even more in the near future.  Please follow and enjoy the journey with me.

 

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2013.  Steve Shipley
SAZ in the Cellar on Facebook
Wine Pinterest Boards
Twitter:  Steve Shipley @shipleyaust;   InkIT Publishing @inkitpub

 

Who is the lucky b#st*rd who bought my 2005 Lindemans Limestone Ridge?

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Who’s the lucky bastard who bought ALL my 2005 Lindemans Limestone Ridge?!?

I just opened a bottle and it is brilliant!  I remember the tasting and the great deal I got on this wine.  We had a magnificent afternoon several years ago in the Lindemans Still House.  Things were different at Lindemans then.  Aaron was serving us that day and he is driving a truck now.  Damien the heart and soul of Lindemans for a dozen years was pushed out by the ‘suits working the numbers’ from Treasury Wine Estates. (I could go on and on about how this will cost TWE hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars but will save that for another post!)

We were sampling and bought some great, great 2005 Lindemans St George and Limestone Ridge that day.  However, I have greatly over-bought wine since returning from Qatar, and once I inventoried it, I was shocked to find out how much wine I had and how much I spent.  I had close to 3,800 bottles of wine!  Frankly, looking back I am astounded at my stupidity in terms of continuing to collect so much wine.  Each purchase on its own was a good deal, but I bought too much at a time and too much to drink over time.  My pleasure had become my burden!

Therefore, I felt I needed to sell off a lot and get it back down to a ‘much more reasonable’ inventory of about 1,500 – 2,000 bottles.  I have sold off about 1,000 bottles so far, but still have about 1,000 more to go.  Since I had so much I wanted to clear, I priced it at a good price point and I decided not to reserve any bottles as ‘not available.’  I felt that I had so much great wine, that it was unlikely someone would buy all of one brand and vintage and even if they did, I had other comparable wines I could still really enjoy.  For example, if someone bought all of my 2004 Penfolds Bin 389 (a superb wine), then I still had my 2005 Lindemans Limestone Ridge.  But damn it!  Now I have neither! And seriously, I did not expect my 12 bottles of various vintages of Penfolds Grange from 1981 – 1996 to all sell since they were so expensive.  Boy, was I wrong and do I regret it now!.  I only have one bottle of the 1981 Grange left (which I have set in reserve for my later drinking pleasure) and one bottle of the 1996 Grange (a most magnificent year!) which is still for sale as it needs a number of years yet to mature, so I am not putting in my ‘reserve.’

I no longer have any of the 2000 Houghton Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon which is one of the best Cab Savs of all time.  And I sold off my 2005 Limestone Ridge which I did not realize I would miss so much until I found an odd bottle in the apartment Vintec wine fridge and opened this evening.  Damn, is it good!  And I paid such a good price for it.  I feel like I have lost some close personal friends never to be spending time with them again, including the:

  • 1999 Penfolds St Henri
  • 1999 Lindemans Stevens Shiraz
  • 1981 and 1982 Penfolds Grange
  • 1987 Lindemans Pyrus
  • 2005 Houghton Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon (mentioned above)
  • 2005 Lindemans Limestone Ridge (mentioned above)
  • 2006 Gabbiano Chianti
  • 2006 Penfolds RWT

Therefore, I have now set aside a ‘reserve’ of about 100 bottles that I must have moving forward and are not for sale.  I have lost many good friends (bottles of wine!) through the process, but in most cases also feel good that while my wines have been ‘cherry-picked,’ they often have gone to friends with good palates.  However, I have parted with some outstanding wines which I have had in the cellar for up to ten years and cared for and looked forward to drinking in the future.  My wife cried when I told here about selling off all of her favorite 1999 Lindeman Stevens Shiraz, but I was fortunate to find one lone bottle in the Vintec and one more at our place in the Hunter Valley which we can enjoy as special treats in the months ahead.

But drinking my last bottle of the 2005 Lindemans Limestone Ridge tonight makes me ask me once again the question, “Who is that lucky bastard that bought ALL of my 2005 Limestone Ridge?”

How much should a good bottle of wine cost?

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The first answer is “Probably more than you are paying for it!”  However, there is such a glut of good wine on the market, and far too many grapes being produced that the cost of a good bottle of wine is relatively inexpensive.  Of course, now that the Chinese are becoming significantly more prosperous in this – the “Year of the Dragon”, and believe they have or are acquiring a taste for good wine, they are buying up the very top end of the market which will certainly push up prices for that segment.

The Chinese are also buying up a lot of wineries and parcels of land that produce grapes around the world and more wine will find its way to China over the next several years.  This will reduce the global glut somewhat.  But by looking around, you should still be able to buy very good wine for under $10 per bottle and even cheaper.

The average bottle of wine in my cellar is around $40 – $50 per bottle, but then I have some truly great wines in my cellar, and many of them have 10 – 20 years of aging built into them so I have a large stock of great wines which are drinkable today.   Yet, I also have a large number of outstanding wines I paid less than $20 per bottle for.  I have very few wines I paid over $100 per bottle, as I find it is just not worth it except for very special occasions to drink a bottle of wine that expensive.  You just do not need to.

Blake Stevens, in his recently published book (which I have reviewed) “Still Stupid at Sixty” has a Chapter entitled “Don’t Overindulge in Passions”.  The point of the chapter is that we can get carried away with our passions and really overspend because we want to treat ourselves to the very best.  He believes that for most things that can be purchased, for the very, very best (measured as being 100% of possible capabilities and quality – assuming you can actually measure these traits at all!), you are paying 10 time more than if you accepted an alternative that was at 99% and that still costs 10 times what the alternative at 95% of capability and quality would cost.  He says this applies to jewelry, stereo systems, and wine among other things.  It is easy to spend $1,000 for a bottle of wine and for that price, it better not just be excellent, but it should also be rare and have collectible value.  But I can find wines for $100 per bottle that almost all people would say was as good or better than the bottle that cost $1,000.  And I could buy bottles of wine for $10 that many if not most people thought was as good or nearly as good as the bottle for $100 or even $1,000.  I think this is true and it is why I have very few bottles anywhere close to $1,000 per bottle (Only two which were used for my wife’s 40th birthday party!).  Do not overspend on wine!  I believe for most people, they do not need to spend over $20 per bottle and there are a number of annual reviews by wine critics that recommend the best buys you can get for under $20 per bottle.  This is a very safe way to buy wine that you know will not disappoint when you open a bottle or bring one to a party.

Two years ago, we did a tasting comparing wines that were made half of the Shiraz grape and half of the Cabernet Sauvignon grape.  We tasted a line-up of Penfolds Bin 389 with vintages from 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998 and a Wolf Blass Grey Label from 1996.  The Penfolds Bin 389 would have fetched $35 – $50 when they were sold and more now.  The Wolf Blass Grey Label was bought for $16 per bottle (I am so glad I bought 3 dozen of those, but I only have one bottle left!).  However, the group of very discerning wine palettes that evening pick the Wolf Blass as the best wine, even though it cost half or even a third of what the Penfolds Bin 389 vintages cost.

An American friend of mine who had been living in Australia for two years at the time had dinner out with my wife and me and another colleague visiting form the US.  I brought two bottles – one white and one red – to the Indian BYOB restaurant we were eating at.  After finishing both bottles and still having a decent amount of food to eat, my American friend who had been in Australia for two years and I went to the bottle shop next door to get another couple of bottles.  I asked him if he had any favorites he wanted to drink and his response was “Steve, when I arrived in Sydney two years ago, I decided to pay about $30 per bottle and I thought the wine was really good, so then I backed off to about $25  – $28 per bottle and still thought it was really good and then backed off to about $20 per bottle and it was still really good.  I am now down to about $8 per bottle and still think it is really good!  Therefore, you pick something out you like!”

Like I said – and especially in Australia – you can get some really good wine for under $10 per bottle.