Wine Comes in a Case for a Reason
By Martha McBride
I’m looking at you, onesie-, twosie-, threesie-buying wine drinkers. Why are you doing this to yourself? Do you really think you’re not going to go through all 12 bottles of wine? Is it that you don’t want the checkout girl to think you’re a lush? Or, are you in denial about how much wine you (or really, your friends) drink? The average case of wine weighs approximately 36 lbs, but surely it’s the job of some young cute thing to carry that box out to your car. Making six separate trips to the store to buy your case seems wasteful, inefficient, and silly; especially when half the wine stops are in a rush on the way to something where you will “need” the wine. There is no end to occasions you respond to with a bottle of wine. Wine consistently comes in as the top hostess gift and top general gift given by and to adults. Let’s just pretend for a moment, though, that you overbuy! What would happen if you bought a whole case and instead of drinking, using, or giving away all 12 bottles over the next 30-to-60 days, you went through the wine more slowly. Some would call that cellaring their wine! You will eventually drink the wine and probably faster than you’d estimate. There is no point in turning the acquisition of a dozen bottles of wine into a long, drawn-out process of many retail visits. And, in the case of a lot of delicious wines you may fall in love with, by not purchasing a few bottles of each at a time you risk returning to find that particular wine gone, baby, gone. Many retailers will give you a break on shipping or a discount on the wine itself when you buy it by the case and some will even allow you to take advantage of those bonuses even when you mix-and-match the bottles in your case. It can be a leap from the a-couple-bottles-with-your-groceries mindset to the I-want-to-keep-some-of-this-on-hand outlook, but all you can do is test it out to see how it works and feels. You may never opt to haul 12 bottles in six car trips again!