A Report From Wine Explorer Diego Samper – Wine Collecting: Why the Best Bottles Shouldn’t Wait
You remember it, don’t you?
That first trip to the river. Or the beach. Knees bent, eyes down, fingers wet. You weren’t looking for anything—but then something caught your eye. A flat black rock with a white vein running through it like a secret. Or one perfectly round, smoothed by water and time. Maybe a jagged little thing that sparkled just enough to feel like treasure.
You picked it up. Turned it over in your hand. You didn’t know why you liked it. But it was yours. No other kid had that rock. Or that stick. It meant something. And that’s how character begins—the things we choose, the stories we give them. Much like wine collecting, where each bottle tells its own story.
Collection starts this way. Rocks, shells, bottle caps. Later, it’s coins, coasters, labels, fridge magnets. At some point, every brand went into collector mode. You felt like you were building something. Achieving something.
Maybe the bottles in our club are like those rocks. The things we choose. The stories we give them. And the ones we get to share—over dinners, birthdays, lazy Sundays. They mark time. They carry meaning. And if we’re lucky, they remind us we were here—alive, laughing, pouring one more glass.
I grew up with a music collector. My dad. Vinyl, CDs, books. Mostly jazz and blues. He went to festivals, chased rare recordings, and read liner notes like scripture. Not for status. Not for resale. For joy. Pick any disc off the shelf and he can tell you where he got it, who he was with, why it mattered. He still plays them. Not as often. But enough. Because he knows what he has. And he uses it.
Here’s the thing—we forget to. We collect, we store, we wait. We treat the best things like they’re too good for now.
A club member, Thomas, sent me a story recently. A man in Los Angeles lost everything in the wildfires—his house, his music, his wine. Bottles saved for years. Unopened. Gone. After that, he decided: if he bought a great bottle again, he’d drink it that night. No more saving. No more waiting.
Some things are meant to be enjoyed. A wine. A book. The good plates. The best things aren’t made better by saving them. They’re made better by using them.
And yet, we wait.
If you’re ready to start building your own shelf of bottles that turn ordinary nights into stories worth telling, you can join the club here.
In wine collecting, the greatest mistake is saving bottles so long that the moment to enjoy them never comes. We actually save bottles for the perfect meal. We wait for guests to use the nice china. We try to schedule magic, and then wonder why it doesn’t show up. But life works better unscripted. I always say: open the good bottle first—before everyone gets drunk. But sometimes you open the good bottle simply because it’s the only one left. And that’s fine too.
Some bottles belong to a moment. And if you don’t create that moment, it disappears. I remember the best ones we drank—over messy dinners, standing in kitchens, with laughter bouncing and sauce still simmering. Opened too early or too late, but exactly right.
We’ve sacrificed experience for convenience. But experience is what really gets us going. It’s what we remember. You can now get almost anything delivered to your door—including wine from a small vineyard clinging to a cliff in the Andes. The kind of wine no big brand would dare bottle at scale. Too slow. Too risky. Too real.
And still, people wait. For a better night. A better version of themselves.
But real life doesn’t wait.
The best bottles are opened by accident. On the porch. With chips. With someone who just happened to stop by. No ceremony. Just you, the wine, good company—and a moment that’s alive.
Even your phone now tries to finish your sentences before you’ve felt them. Predictive everything. Sold as convenience. But maybe it’s just another way of skipping the present.
So take a walk in the park.
Open the wine.
Not because it’s rare. Not because it’s expensive. But because you’re here. And it’s time.
Like jazz—when it’s good, it’s not because it was planned. It’s because everyone’s tuned in, listening, building something together in real time.
Wine collecting is only meaningful if the bottles eventually become part of real, shared experiences. Make the moment. Before it becomes just another thing you meant to do, someday.
Cheers,
Diego Samper
Wine Explorer