Every January, I look back at my wine-buying purchases from the previous year. I keep an inventory of my wine, so it’s really not hard to sort it by date and analyze the status of things. As you might expect, this sort of self-evaluation can sometimes be a sobering process, if you’ll forgive the pun. “I bought all THIS,” I would frequently say to myself in disbelief. Then I would promise myself that the following year would be different. I would resolve to make smarter purchases—whether that would entail more of this and less of that, or something else entirely.

New Year’s wine resolutions are all about self-improvement. With this in mind, here are some of the wine resolutions I’ve made for 2014:

• Spend a little more money for better wines; just buy fewer bottles
• Re-establish a monthly wine budget, and get serious about trying to live within the allocated amount
• Buy more Spanish wine
• Investigate Oregon wines
• Visit Burgundy
• Encourage people to stop assuming they won’t like Beaujolais
• Experiment more with Italian wines
• Explore a new (to me) wine region
• Re-visit the wineries of the Santa Cruz Mountains
• Stop buying wine gadgets
• Stop ignoring South American wines
• Encourage others to share their opinion about “what’s in the glass”

Well, those are my 12 wine resolutions for 2014. It does seem a shame that we have to quantify these for ourselves, in order to change our less inviting habits. And, I could easily add more to the list, but why torture myself? If I can accomplish even 50 percent of this, I will consider myself both persevering and fortunate.