Knowing your wine- And how to build a collection
Article originally printed in ICON magazine- October 2006
In Part 1, 2 and 3 we explored different styles of red, white and summer wines. Now that you have probably found a few favourites you’ll want to have some in stock for entertaining and impromptu dinner parties or gatherings with family & friends.
It may seem a simple process buying wine, but keeping wine is a different matter. We can easily forget that wine is a living product, that is either enhanced when aged and stored correctly or ruined when stored in bad conditions.
Throughout future issues we will be discovering many fine wines, and I would like to ensure that you do not purchase these wines, then waste your money due to storing your wine in poor conditions, hence ruining it.
I see it as my responsibility to ensure that you get good advice in every aspect of enjoying fine wine.
Wine is a living product…
If you like to have a few dozen bottles of wine around the place you need to ensure that you’re keeping it in the right conditions, if not, its quality can be quickly affected. It can take just a few months of storing wine somewhere either too warm, or near light to completely destroy it. Also if you are buying wine now, to lay down and mature over a few years, it really does need to be stored correctly, otherwise you’ll be very disappointed when you come to drink it, especially if you’ve saved it for a special occasion!
There are three key conditions for storing wine:
- Temperature – storing wine somewhere too hot and it ages too quickly, losing its vibrancy and becoming tired and stale. The ideal temperature for wine to be kept in is 8-17 degrees.
- Humidity – wine bottles need to be kept horizontal and in a slightly damp atmosphere to prevent the corks from drying out.
- Clean, dark & quiet – wine doesn’t like direct sunlight, noise or constant vibrations.
So to summarise, keeping your wine under the stairs, on top of the fridge or in the garage is not going to do it any good.
So where should you store your wine?
- You can purchase a ‘Wine Cabinet’ – these are freestanding units, which look essentially like a fridge. They can store from 50-300 bottles, ranging in price from £250 to £7000
- Convert a room – a contractor can insulate an existing room or basement, install an air conditioning unit and build racking bins for the wine storage.
- The ultimate – a dedicated Spiral Wine Cellar.
A Spiral Cellar can be installed almost anywhere in your home in less than a week. It can keep up to 1600 bottles in ideal storage conditions. There are many trap door options; glass, recessed to take wooden flooring, motorised with ceramic or stone tiles. Various sizes are available, storing from 650 bottles to 1600 bottles, costing from £9,000 to £22,000.
Having a good selection of wine at home…
One of the joys of having a wine cellar is that when you have friends and family around, you’ll always have plenty of the right wine to offer your guests. It also means you can buy rare and exclusive wines in bulk, and have somewhere safe to keep them. As you develop a fine wine collection, seek the advice of a wine consultant and know that every wine you have in stock is to your taste and you’re drinking only the best!
With Christmas coming up, it’s worth thinking now about getting a cellar ready for the festive season. Imagine having you own cellar full of fine wine, and champagne ready for any occasion – but also full of very fine wines, from small producers.
Some to drink now, some to keep for a minimum of 5 years… up to 15yrs…plan now for the future!
Spiral Cellars and I are able to provide you with a fully installed and stocked cellar. For example; the cellar would be 2.25m deep, with a capacity of 1100 bottles. It would be stocked with a hand picked selection of 225 wines ready for the Christmas season and beyond. The wines have been selected by myself, as perfect partners for Christmas Lunch, Christmas Eve supper,
The next edition will be on wine tasting – how to recognise good to bad wines.