mar 14, 2017 - WALL STREET JOURNAL Johnny Depp Is $30,000 a Month Too Much to Spend on Wine?

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Is $30,000 a Month Too Much to Spend on Wine?

Johnny Depp made headlines earlier this year when his business managers released a list of alleged expenditures that included $30,000 a month on wine.
Our wine columnist asks: Is that really so big?
By LETTIE TEAGUE

IS IT ACTUALLY possible to spend too much on wine? When Johnny Depp sued his business managers at the Management Group for alleged fraud and professional negligence, Joel and Rob Mandel filed a countersuit, disputing his charges and claiming they had tried to keep the actor in check. To bolster their argument, they published a long list of alleged expenditures from Mr. Depp’s “ultra-extravagant lifestyle,” including $30,000 a month on wine the actor “had flown to him around the world.”

In the filing, the managers also cited $75 million to buy and redecorate 14 residences and more than $3 million to blast the ashes of the late writer Hunter S. Thompson out of a specially made cannon. Mr. Depp’s lawyer, Adam Waldman, noted in an email: “Mr. Depp is ‘accused’ by the business managers he is suing for fraud of spending $30,000 of his own money each month on wine.” The Management Group spokesman David Shane had no further comment on the lawsuits, which remain unresolved, or the wine expenditures.

Oddly enough, there was more media coverage of Mr. Depp’s outsized wine budget than the creation of a cannon to catapult a dead writer’s remains into the air. Was that because his alleged monthly outlay on wine far exceeded what most people consider reasonable, or because no one knew the value of a customized cannon? Then again, was Jack Sparrow’s wine budget really so big after all? Some wine collectors I talked to didn’t seem to think so.

Brad Goldstein, a spokesman for Bill Koch, the billionaire commodities investor and wine collector, was decidedly underwhelmed by Mr. Depp’s expenditures. “Bill Koch sold a case of 1945 Mouton Rothschild at auction last year for $400,000,” he said. If Mr. Depp’s agents were “trying to show excess, they’re in the wrong place,” added Mr. Goldstein, noting it costs a lot more than $30,000 a month to “seriously” invest in first-growth Bordeaux.

Mr. Depp spent much more than $30,000 a month, mostly on first-growth Bordeaux, when he was a client at the Beverly Hills Wine Merchant many years ago, according to proprietor Dennis Overstreet. Mr. Waldman said, “Mr. Depp is a sophisticated investor in first-growth Bordeaux which has turned out to be a great asset class over the years.” Although Mr. Overstreet works with many big Hollywood names, he said he now sells some of his most impressive bottles to foreign businessmen. He recently sold a Melchior (18-liter bottle) of 2005 Château Cheval Blanc to a prominent Asian businessman for $65,000. The cult Napa Valley Cabernet Screaming Eagle is a favorite among Russian collectors, added Mr. Overstreet. A magnum of the 2010 vintage costs $10,000. “It’s not about the money but the prestige,” he said, adding perhaps unnecessarily: “Money isn’t an issue.”

Was this true of other wine lovers? Budgeting isn’t a topic that really comes up, at least in my circles. While friends and colleagues readily describe how much a particular bottle costs (either lamenting how much they spent or celebrating the deal they got), I don’t remember anyone ever talking specifically about how much they spend a month on wine. I guess it’s like comparing salaries or savings—the sort of conversations that almost never take place.

Indeed, when I posed the question of wine expenditures to my collector friends, most declined to offer details. “I don’t have a budget,” sniffed one free-spending friend with a taste for grand cru Burgundy. Another didn’t want to be quoted, even anonymously. “I prefer to leave things like prices I pay or dollars I spend out of the public domain,” he wrote in an email.

I did manage to convince a few people to talk, but most had never thought to calculate what they spent on wine each week or month. One friend, a hospital executive in New York, tabulated his expenditures aloud as we spoke. He said he and his wife went through “a minimum” of a bottle a night. With each bottle costing about $25—sometimes more, sometimes less—and adding in the occasional wine he bought while dining out, he figured he spent around $10,000 a year.

New York attorney Jay Hack doesn’t really have a wine budget, either. He just buys what he wants—within reason, of course. “That’s the advantage of having two lawyers in the family,” he quipped, meaning they had the flexibility to spend some money. Although Mr. Hack has spent as much as $500 on a bottle (on impulse during an auction), he is more likely to spend $50 or less on a regular bottle of wine. He estimated his annual wine budget was “somewhere in the low five figures.”

My friend Mario Carlino, a chef in New Jersey, doesn’t keep close track of his wine expenses, which he said vary according to vintages. When great vintages of wines he loves, like Barolo and Amarone, are released, he buys multiple cases. His greatest single expenditure was the 2006 Quintarelli Giuseppe Alzero; he bought a number of bottles at $350 each. But, he reasoned, “it’s a wine my wife loves.”

When Ian Dorin worked as the wine director of retailer Wine Library in Springfield, N.J., he said he knew people who had “rigid budgets of $2,000 a month,” and even if they saw a wine they really loved, they would forgo it if they had already hit their number that month. Mr. Dorin, now director of fine wine for New York-based Heritage Auctions, is a bit more elastic with his own expenditures, noting a seasonal component to his approach: He spends less in the summer, when he’s drinking simple white wines and rosés, and more in winter, when he tends toward more complex reds. And when someone in the trade tells him about a new wine, he’ll take a flyer, for up to $100, he said.

After we spoke, Mr. Dorin decided to total his expenses and found he spends about $6,000 a year on wine—much lower than the five-figure outlay he initially guessed. Mr. Dorin also has access to an inventory of wines owned by his company, bottles he opens for business dinners and lunches. They augment his budget, he said, but declined to say by how much.

Other oenophiles I know spend considerably less. Take, for example, my friend Alan, who said he didn’t need to track his expenditures because he is “cheap by nature.” Alan figured he spent a modest $3,000 a year on wine, paying about $25 a bottle retail and around $60 to $70 on wine in restaurants.

Why do so many people choose not to keep track of their wine expenditures? Is it because, collectible bottles aside, wine is something to be quickly consumed? Is it because wine is, for most people, part of a daily meal, and keeping track of its cost would be like noting the price of pasta? Or is it simply a form of denial—if you don’t know how much you’re spending, you won’t have to stop?

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