Stuart, great question, you should really drink more wine (is this humanly possible?). Your postprandial insights, and, paradoxically, improved grammar and spelling, are testaments to the gentle powers of the fermented grape.

I am very much struggling to absorb the amount of music I purchase on a monthly basis, which, as you astutely surmise, includes not just the 90 emusic downloads (say, 6 albums conservatively), but two or three other albums either purchased through itunes or on disc. Add to the fact that I have music on both my home and work computers, that the hard drive on the former, which houses my music collection in its entirety, is quickly exceeding capacity, that my 60gb ipod can't contain all the songs so it contains an ever-shifting variety of new and old music, none of which ever seems to contain either the older song I want to hear at a given time or a newer album I've recently downloaded and haven't yet transferred (often due to lack of space on the ipod), and that my iphone, which is even smaller in size and syncs only with my work laptop, which holds only a fraction of the music I download, is usually the only player I carry with me on the road, which is where I get most of my listening time in, and well, you get a sense of the difficulties I'm having in, as you put it, reconcilling the vast quantities of music at my disposal with my limited amount of time to appreciate it.

Having said that, I'm loathe to give up my grandfathered-in, extremely generous 90 d/ls for $24 per month or 1,080 tracks per year or 72+ albums (at a conservative 15 tracks per album average, more if you consider that many of the discs are closer to 12 tracks per) for $288 or just under $4/album. And as you also noted, there are many artists who aren't available on emusic in Canada, which forces me elsewhere if I want to purchase that music.

So, while I'm unwilling to get off the 'grab as much music as I can' merry-go-round, I also don't have time to get in those minimum 3-5 listens per album that Mike suggests, and with which I'll wholeheartedly agree, are required to really understand an album.

The way I see it, my options at this point are:

• reduce my downloads and/or quit emusic and limit my consumption to that which I can actually consume [chance of short term adoption: 5%]
• come up with a better system for evaluating new music that ensures I devote enough time to the new stuff to properly grasp/understand/love/loathe it [chance of short term adoption: 5%]
• resign myself to the fact that i may not get around to listening to all the new stuff and that it may sit on my hard drive untouched and unloved, like so many plastic wrapped discs sitting on a shelf in Derek's apartment, where, like a fine wine (bringing the post full circle now to your original vino-themed opening), it will age gracefully, waiting for that perfect day to be opened and either savoured with gusto or spat out like the oxidized, trichloroanisole-tainted plonk it has revealed itself to be [chance of short term adoption: 90%]

I'm open to other suggestions, and, as always, to wine recommendations.