Setting up a wine cellar

Like the idea of drinking older wine? So set up a wine cellar! Even if it’s just a few cases here and there under the stairs or the spare beds, a modest cellar might be enough. If you think you only want to drink a single mature bottle of wine every week, or fifty a year, and that you’d be happy if they’d been kept for around five years after purchase, you’re only going to need room for about 250-300 bottles. Sounds a lot, but twenty to twenty-five cases don’t take up that much space.

There’s no need to do buy it all once, although you could even buy a different bottle each week of the year to put into your cellar. But it’s often more sensible to buy wines in minimum allocations of three. If you only buy single bottles of each wine, you’ll miss the pleasure involved in tracking a wine’s progress over a few years, which is an essential part of the fun in owning a wine cellar.

There’s also no real need to spend more than $15 per bottle to have a choice across a wide range of perfectly suitable wines to cellar for five years. Then ultimately, five years after you started your collection, you’ll be able to start dipping into the wines you bought in year one. From that moment onwards for the rest of your life, provided you keep depositing fifty each year, that’s the number of bottles you can commence to withdraw. Easy, isn’t it?

Your next challenge is to discover where this collection is going to reside. Let’s focus now on darkness, a lack of vibration and a constant, but cool temperature. Your main tool will be a maximum-minimum thermometer and your mission is to find the space in your domicile whose temperature varies the least on a day-to-night basis and also from season to season. You can save a lot of time by ignoring possible sites adjacent to windows or external walls, especially any that might face north or west. Similarly, avoid permanent household fixtures that might generate heat, such as heating banks or air conditioners. My cellar varies between 15-17 degrees throughout the year and its wines develop at a steady and reasonable pace within that range. Be careful about keeping bottles for a long time above 20 degrees, since that might be a little too warm for wines to ultimately reveal their true potential.

It’s essential to keep your bottles in the dark and away as much as possible from the vibrations generated by machinery or traffic. Daylight can damage wine, since ultraviolet radiation is liable to oxidise and spoil. Your research may point towards somewhere under the house, under the bed, under the stairs or even along a corridor. If you have little choice in your house but to build wine racking down a well-lit wall or corridor, it might be a good idea to install a long dark curtain along its length to protect the bottles from any such damage.

Remember to keep all your wines on their side, or upside down in their boxes, so their corks remain moist at the business end. The only wines you can afford to store standing upright are bottles of blended fortified wines such as tawny ports, muscats, tokays and sherries. Vintage ports, which age like highly alcoholic red wines, must be kept on their sides. Sparkling wines, be they red or white, must be kept lying down.

You don’t want to keep your wine in a totally dry atmosphere, since some humidity can help to maintain the cork’s moisture content and its ability to seal at the top end of the bottle. If you think your cellar might be a little too dry, all you need to do is to regularly top up a container of water in the vicinity of the wine.

When thinking about a cellar design, think about how you’re going to do your stocking. If you’re going to buy at least some of your wine in dozen lots, you’re going to need some bins large enough to handle those. But, as time progresses, you might then like to move depleted dozens into half-dozen bins. And then into single bottles, as you get right down to the business end of it all. So, while many cellars just consist of single bottle holders or slots, which are the most space-inefficient of all bin sizes, why not think about a mix of dozen-bottle bins, half-dozen bins and single bottle slots? My list is on computer so it’s relatively easy to find the bin any given bottle should be in. Therefore I don’t need any single bottle bins or slots. My builder fashioned shelving bins from plain untreated pine to store just over a dozen bottles each.

If you’ve got more than a couple of hundred bottles of wine or are expecting to collect that number, sooner or later you’re going to need to keep some form of record system, even if it’s just the most basic of written lists. There’s nothing sadder than to have left a good or classic wine for too long before remembering it’s still in your cellar, unopened. Sadly, there’s no vinous Viagra injection you can slip down the cork to bring it back to life.

While you can find blank cellar books in book stores and some wine stores, I prefer the idea of doing something on a computer. You don’t need to be Einstein to figure out something on readily available spreadsheet or database software, some of which are actually sold with wine cellaring templates. Furthermore, there are several software products especially developed for wine cellaring, each of which have different strengths and weaknesses. Most have examples you can check out on the Internet after a fairly basic search query. Have a look before making your choice. The thing I like about the computerised concept is that you can print out regular updates, onto which you can record deposits and withdrawls, before consolidating a batch of changes back onto your cellar file.

Aside from keeping track of what’s ready to drink and when, a wine cellar list should be able to provide you with a representation of your cellar breakdown, whether by company, variety, age, style or region. That way you can make sure you don’t create an imbalance in your purchases and of course a computerised file makes it even easier to do this. At the moment, my cellar file tells me I don’t have enough shiraz for the year 2003, something I clearly need to address, and quickly.

There’s another vital reason to record your cellar stock, even if you think you could remember it all. The insurance claim, Lord hope you never need to make one. Sadly, however, the insurance companies are regularly greeted by the sight of deeply saddened wine collectors, shuffling up with stories of floods, fire and theft. Without a cellar list, how will you ever receive an accurate estimation of your cellar’s worth? A stray tip worth remembering is that it will take a thief a lot more time to remove twelve unpacked bottles of wine than a conveniently stacked and unopened dozen. So unpack your wine, if you can. Please login to post comment