So You Want to Start a Wine Cellar?

With Paul Ippolito

The Romance Of The Cellar... Now tell me you didn't feel a warm and fuzzy stirring sensation within you the last time you wandered into someone's wine cellar?

Tell me you weren't seduced by the ambience of their collected bottles, all carefully laid down, perfectly stacked in wooden racks, accentuated by subtle lighting and surrounded by the serenity and peacefulness of that wine.

All of this at the same time, accompanied by an anticipation or expectation heartfelt by the wine collector, who after building their collection through years of sacrifice from immediate indulgence, is slowly, progressively and ultimately leading each bottle through a journey to it's individual right moment for consummation.

That warm and fuzzy feeling still there?

I see the romantic is still within you. No, I haven't overdone the Marvin Gaye CDs again, yet I believe the collector and gatherer instinct is in all of us.

So now that we have acknowledged the will to collect might be there within you, let's see how to turn this into action so that you can create a bit of romance and ambience of your own.

1. My Own Cellaring Indulgences
2. Why Cellar Wine?
3. Storing Wine
4. Laying Down Wines
5. Selecting Wine For Cellaring
6. Overview Of Varietals For Cellaring
7. Drinking Windows For Cellared Wine

My Own Cellaring Indulgences

From personal experience, there is nothing better than being ensconced in one's own wine cellar surrounded by your own prized bottles of wine. Truly, it is an absolutely soothing and therapeutic sensation just walking into your wine cellar being surrounded by that wine you have cherished over time (that's as long as you don't use every opportunity as an excuse to crack a bottle or two open whilst you are being soothed).

There is also the pleasure, pride and satisfaction of playing host at dinner or other special occasion and being able to pull out a range of aged vintage wines, taking out their corks and having the magic of age that has worked the wine ready to share with your wine-worthy friends.

So if I haven't converted you over to the joys of collecting and cellaring wine by now, I'm sorry, I doubt I ever will.

Yet for those of you that are still hanging in there, let me take you on a journey that will tell you what is required to collect and cellar wine properly, a voyage that will probably result in you being hooked for life on the joys of cellaring (and drinking) fine vintage wine.

Why Cellar Wine?

Perhaps it all has something to do with the fact that wine is a living thing and constantly changes with age. That's probably why quite a lot of (but not all) wine tastes better, even with only as little as six months in the cellar, to take the edge of the various components that make up a wine.

The aromas, complexity and taste of a wine invariably will take on new and different dimensions with time (hopefully better ones).

Seriously though, it is important to realise that not all wines will improve with extended cellaring bottle age. This sits in with a reality that most wines are not made for long term cellaring and the vast majority of wine in Australia is consumed, as we are informed by marketers, within at most 72 hours of purchase. So, really, what we have is a situation where winemakers make and release wine that they know you will consume almost immediately and make it drinkable almost immediately based on this.

Unfortunately this also has acted as a disincentive for the average punter to stash some away for later themselves.

So why bother? Well quite simply because with time, the fruit, alcohol, tannin and acid components in most wine will blend together over time, resulting in a much more balanced and eminently more approachable wine that should "theoretically" taste better, much better (death and taxes being the only certainties in life).

The amount of time required for those wines worth cellaring to blossom will however depend on the individual wine, the past history of the brand and how you store it. As I said before not all wine styles will benefit from a decade of cellaring, or for that matter even a year or two of cellaring. So what to buy is a relevant consideration when making taking the plunge to create a wine cellar.

As I get older, I place more weight in the saying, "There are no great vintages, just great bottles," which for me promotes the view that the way a wine is stored is a far more important issue than any long established reputation for aging it may have.

Cellaring wine is not just about putting a few bottles away on their sides and hoping for the best but rather quite a challenging issue in terms of where to keep it, at what temperature, how to minimise temperature variation and storing the actual bottles, let alone deciding which bottles you choose to cellar.

Storing Wine

Probably the best storage option for wine in the long term is having it kept underground in a purpose built cellar, where the temperature is cool, temperature variation is limited, the bottles can be kept in a dark, quiet and stable place. This can be somewhat impractical and costly option however.

Nonetheless, if you do want to cellar wine at home, you are going to need to find a cool spot in your house that's also dark, has about the right level of humidity, is without vibration and is not too dry. It could be under the stairs, inside the wardrobe or the linen press or under a bed as long as you aren't going to open or use it very often.

The reason for this is that all of these factors impact upon the wine, thereby shortening its lifespan by hastening the oxidation of a wine (i.e. quite simply the cork contracts and lets air in and it goes off).

The ideal room temperature for a wine cellar, in my opinion, is somewhere between the 12 and 16 degree centigrade mark. I read an article the other day written in London, recommending 8 - 12 degrees but this would be pretty much unachievable here in Australia.

What's all the fuss about you ask? Well, for every degree higher than that range, the shorter the maturation time of the wine becomes, as the extra temperature accelerates the wine's development. This might seem like a modern day time saving device for drinking your good wine a lot sooner but I'm telling you it's not a good thing.

The suggested temperature range unfortunately wreaks havoc for wine collectors in most of Australia, making cellaring at home a less than perfect option and damn hard to achieve, even in the midst of Winter. The options thereafter become pretty limited in that you can either arrange professional wine storage (and lose that warm and fuzzy feeling every time you want to wander into the cellar) or else buy quite expensive temperature controlled storage units (which do however look quite schmick and sexy) or failing that, do what most of us do reluctantly, which is to accept a tolerance of a few degrees variation (but no more than this) in our cellar.

Having said that, an even more important consideration to the actual temperature a wine is stored is the constancy of it. When temperature rises and falls, it invariably causes the cork to expand and contract and let air into the wine bottle which leads to oxidation.

Accepting that you can't get your temperature down to a preferred level, you do however need to ensure you can achieve a relatively constant centigrade range at its lowest possible level, monitoring it with a temperature gauge, all of which is far better than a line of temperature readings of say 10, 12, 18, 25, 21, 10, 18, 22 and 16 degrees centigrade during the course of a week.

Laying Down Wines

How to store your actual wines within your cellar is a topic in itself. There are a multitude of racking options ranging from inexpensive practical homemade solutions to customised fancy manufactured systems that range from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars in cost. My advice is to look at the space you have to store your wine, think about what numbers of wines you intend to cellar and drink, the budget you have and then shop around for the style that suits.

One important thing with laying down your wines is to remember if you place them on their sides, label up, the cork will stay moist and expanded and won't let as much air in. Having said this, its not a matter of just doing this and walking away as you still need to inspect them regularly (not by tasting) but by observation to ensure there is no cork seepage (a sure sign of problems). Wines with Stelvin screw top caps don't have to placed on their sides but I still do this as much for convenience as for any other reason.

Selecting Wine For Cellaring

Having got to the stage where you now have a cellar with the type of racking you desire, the fun part now begins with the selection of the wines for aging. I don't have the time or space here to tell you which particular wines to purchase within the confines of this article but if you email me at Paul_Ippolito@hotmail.com I'll give you a subscription to my free monthly newsletter for wine consumers, 'Paul Ippolito Talks Wine', which will give you a heads up on the types of wines you might want to cellar.

Alternately, contact a reputable wine merchant and start to develop a relationship with them so that they can better understand what your tastes (and budget) are so they can guide you with your purchase.

Here's a quick rundown about what wine types and styles to consider broadly when cellaring the stuff. My advice is to buy lots of 3-6 bottles of each wine. This is so you can open successive bottles over time and assess how the wine is evolving.

Having said this, the days of buying a case of one type of wine are well and truly over in light of the sheer variety of choice in good quality wine today.

The principles for selecting suitable types of wines for cellaring are just that, as there will always be exceptions and sometimes these are the wines that set your palate on edge or will bitterly disappoint. As I have said repeatedly, not all wine is meant to be cellared, indeed quite a fair bit of it is not meant to be. Please bear in mind that a mediocre wine will never improve dramatically through cellaring.

Think about your wine tastes now but also take into account your tastes in wine will evolve over time and what you cellar today may not be what you want to drink tomorrow.

Overview Of Varietals For Cellaring

Here's my view on what varietals and from what regions you should look at when choosing wine for cellaring:

• Riesling - Eden and Clare Valleys in SA, Canberra and Tasmania.
  
• Chardonnay - Margaret River in WA, Beechworth and the Yarra Valley in Victoria and Hunter Valley in NSW and the Adelaide Hills in SA.
  
• Semillon - Hunter Valley or the Barossa Valley in SA.
  
• Shiraz - McLaren Vale, Barossa Valley, Clare, Heathcote, Bendigo and Hunter Valley.
  
• Cabernet Sauvignon - Coonawarra in SA, Margaret River or the Yarra Valley.
  
• Pinot Noir - Yarra Valley, Geelong or Mornington Peninsula

Drinking Windows For Cellared Wine

Now that your wine is safely tucked into the cellar you still need to keep a check about what is there and when it should start to be drunk. This will avoid you finding a bottle that is past its best and believe me there is nothing worse than opening a bottle of one of your finest to find it is well past its optimum date (normally at about the same time you are out to impress someone with that special bottle).

For keeping track of what you have got in your new cellar you can use a cellar book, tags on the neck of the wines, a variety of software packages or create a spreadsheet of your own.

Get into the habit of making tasting notes for each wine you open however basic you think those notes might be and keep opening bottles and reviewing your notes so that you can work out for yourself when your wine will reach its peak and more so when it is on the decline.

Peak drinking window periods differ dramatically depending on the vintage of the wine and the cellaring conditions the wine has been subjected to, so monitoring them yourself is a necessity (and, anyway it gives you an excuse to spend some soothing time in that cellar). If you've bought more than one bottle, then wait six months, then try it and assess it again as this will give you an idea of when to next try it.

But remember the golden rule that it's always better to open a bottle too early than too late.

There are a stack of well written wine guide books available in Australia which give estimates to the expected life of many wines or else contact the winery for their advice.

At the end of the day, it's your opinion, not anyone else's that matters (and so it should be!). With that I offer you my congratulations now that you are well on the journey towards enjoying the fruits of your new cellar as well as the joy it will bring you for many years to come.

Paul can be contacted by email at Paul_Ippolito@hotmail.com where you can also request to be placed on his mailing list for his wine newsletter.

About Paul Ippolito.