The
wineanorak's guide to
Storing wines at home
One of my wine fantasies goes like this. Just before the
guests arrive for dinner, I open a sturdy wooden door in the hallway
and carefully negotiate some worn stone steps down into the cool,
quiet depths of a cavernous cellar. I wander for some minutes among
the rows of rather dusty bottles sleeping in their tidy piles,
plucking out one here, one there, until I’ve found what I came for.
For some fortunate readers with genuine underground cellars
this fantasy might be a reality. But cellars like these are as rare as
hen’s teeth in modern homes. While professional storage is one
option for the majority who lack proper cellars, it’s an
unsatisfying option for those of us who want to have their wines to
hand – either because planning ahead to the degree that professional
storage requires is an unwanted hassle, or because we just enjoy
ogling and fondling our precious bottles.
How should wine be stored? Temperature is probably the most
important factor. Wine ageing involves a complex series of chemical
reactions, and these take place faster at higher temperatures. The
problem is, not only do these reactions speed up as the mercury rises,
but their nature also changes. So while a wine kept at a steady 20 °C
will mature faster, it is likely to be less interesting and complex than one
kept at the conventional cellar temperature of 1112 °C. Still higher
temperatures will cook wine, completely ruining it. With a paucity of
decent scientific data it’s hard to be precise, but keeping a wine
above 25 °C for a few months will inevitably kill it, as will shorter
exposures to temperatures above 30 °C. At the other end of the scale,
temperatures below 10 °C aren’t going do damage wine, but they will
slow down its maturation. But go down too far and there’s a risk
that the wine will freeze. Not recommended.
Fluctuation in temperature is also undesirable, because it
increases the risk of oxygen getting to the wine. As the temperature
changes, the liquid in the bottle expands and contracts, and if the
cork isn’t forming a perfect seal there’s a danger that small
amounts of air will enter. Wine ageing is a reductive process that
takes place in the absence of oxygen, and if any air does get past the
cork, this will rapidly prove fatal to the liquid inside. It follows
that older wines, with
their less elastic corks, are far more susceptible to temperature
variation than younger ones.
The relatively benign British climate means that short-term
passive home storagein an insulated cupboard, or a north-facing
room with the radiators turned off, for exampleis a possibility.
But this isn’t to be recommended for expensive winesif you ever
want to re-sell, provenance (where the wine has been and how it has
been stored) is critical, and auction houses aren’t likely to be
interested in wines stored at passive temperaturethose you’re
intending to keep for more than a few years.
Dedicated
wine storage cabinets
If you want to keep your first growths in pristine condition,
it’s going to cost. The cheapest option is to buy a standalone wine
cabinet. Although the manufacturers get upset when people say this,
think of these as redesigned fridges, designed to run at higher
temperatures and altered to maintain an ideal relative humidity of
around 70%. The compressor unit is also tweaked to minimize vibration.
The market leader is Eurocave, who make a range of dedicated wine
cabinets. According to Eurocave, the average sale is a cabinet
configured for 210 Bordeaux bottles at a delivered price of £1400.
Last year he sold some 900 units, mainly to private customers. The
entry-level Eurocave fits around 40 bottles for £780. The cabinets
come with a variety of custom options, and can be configured to fit
different sized bottles. Eurocave cabinets contain heating elements as
well as a cooling unit, and can cope with an ambient operating
temperature in the range –5 ° C to +35 ºC—ideal for garages as
well as in the home.
Eurocave’s main competitor in the UK is Transtherm.
Interestingly, both outfits are owned by the same French company,
Groupe EuroCave SA. Transtherm units offer equivalent features to
those of Eurocave, but differ in appearance and are distributed
through separate channels. Vin Garde, one of the two UK distributors,
sells 600700 of these a year. Again, most of these sales are to
private customers. And the prices? To give you an idea, a medium sized
unit taking 144 bottles retails for £1266, and a large cabinet with a
184 bottle capacity is £1499.
The advantage of the Eurocave and Transtherm cabinets is that
they are designed with wine storage in mind. Consequently, they’re
deep enough for the bottles to overlap neatly at the neck. Other units
derived from standard sized fridges are more affordable, but suffer
from less efficient storage and tricky retrieval of bottles. Vin Garde
also distributes the Vintec cabinets, based on the standard size
kitchen unit, with a 60 x 60 cm base. The 90 bottle size will set you
back £799, with six height adjustable storage shelves. Because these
units don’t have a heating element they can’t really be kept in a
garage, but they’re good for the home. Other manufacturers producing
similar wine storage cabinets are Miele, Liebherr and Norcool.
A newcomer to the UK market is Vinosafe, distributed by
L’Amour du Vin. They
make a wide range of home storage devices, including the TVR range of
conventional cabinets and the larger AVR/ATB units with built-in air
conditioning. These units are finished in a rather striking (or
alarming, depending on your taste) burgundy colour, and they
are quite expensive, starting at £1130 for a TVR unit taking up to
150 bottles and going up to £4929 for a 1000 bottle, four-door ATB
cabinet.
The key thing to bear in mind in buying one of these
stand-alone wine cabinets is capacity. If you are a fairly motivated
wine geek it won’t take you long to fill up a 200-bottle unit. Wise
counsel seems to be to think how many bottles you are intending to
store, and then double that number. One of the great attractions of
these units is that they are simple to install (you just plug them in)
and you can take them with you if you move. But if you require storage
for thousands of bottles, then you probably wouldn’t want a bank of
10 Eurocaves lining your dining room wall. This is where the next
option comes in.
The
walk-in cellar
If you have the space, then you could always create your own walk-in
cellar by using specialized air conditioning units. Eurocave have
recently entered this market, selling two temperature control units
designed for rooms up to 10 m3 and 20 m3 (priced
at £1500 and £1800, respectively). A popular option is to partition
off part of the garage, making an alcove. As a rough guide, an area
2.5 ´ 2 m will take 1600 bottles. For the less thirsty, 650
bottles will fit into a space 2 m ´ 1.5 m. These units were only introduced last year, and so
far 30 have been sold. Other similar specialized air conditioners on
the market are the Norcool Coolmaster (£880 to £1300) and Fondis
Winemaster (£950 to £1650), both of which are available from Spiral
Cellars Ltd. Standard air conditioners aren’t designed to run at
such low temperatures, and are unsuitable.
If you are planning to go down this route, then there are
some important points to bear in mind. First, the cellar space needs
to be thoroughly insulated, or the conditioning unit will be running
all the time. That could be expensive. Second, creating different
temperature compartments can cause condensation, so the cellar will
have to be properly designed with a suitable vapour barrier. Richard
Gold’s awkwardly titled How and why to build a wine cellar (ISBN: 0932 66454 7) is widely
regarded as the classic reference book on this subject. Perfect for
wine-loving DIY nuts. Other help is available by canvassing the
opinions of wine
nuts about their experiences on discussion fora such as the Wine Lover's
Discussion Group (www.wldg.com).
Spiral
Cellars
The final option is possibly the most ingenious, and comes in
the form of the spiral cellar. This is a solid concrete cylinder, sunk
into the ground and with access through a trapdoor. There is a spiral
staircase for access and the bottles are recessed into bins
surrounding the stairs. Since 1978 10 000 of these units have been
installed in French homes. 2 m wide, the cellar comes in depths of 2,
2.25, 2.5 and 3 m depths, taking up to 1600 bottles. Although you
could have one recessed into the floor of your living room, a common
option is to have them in garages or conservatories. A range of sizes
are available, and the most popular choice is a 2 m deep cellar taking
1000 bottles, at a fully installed price of £7049 + VAT. Last year
some 150 of these cellars were installed in UK homes. Of course, you
can’t take these with you when you go, so you have to be settled in
your current location to make this a sensible prospect.
UK
supplier details
-
Eurocave
Importers Ltd, 38-40 New Cavendish Street, London W1G 8UD
Phone: 020 7935 4679 Fax: 020 7935 0479
E-mail: admin@eurocave.co.uk
Website: www.eurocave.co.uk
-
Vin
Garde Ltd (UK agents for Transtherm and Vintec), 37 High Street,
Thames Ditton, Surrey KT17 OSD
Phone: 020 8398 9300 Fax: 020 8398 6300
E-mail: roywilson@vin-garde.demon.co.uk
-
Spiral
Cellars Ltd, Court House, 23 Woodfield Lane, Ashtead, Surrey KT21 2BQ
Phone: 01372 279166 Fax: 01372 273482
E-mail: info@spiralcellars.com
Website: www.spiralcellars.com
-
Miele
Company Ltd, Fairacres, Marcham Road, Abingdon OX14 1TW
Phone: 01235 554455 Fax: 01235 554477
E-mail: info@miele.co.uk
Website: www.miele.co.uk
-
L’Amour
du Vin (Vinosafe), 2 Coalyard, All Saints
Lane, Sutton Courtenay, OX14 4AG
E-mail: info@l-amour-du-vin.com
Website: www.l-amour-du-vin.com
-
Tanglewood
Wine Accessories (supply Liebherr wine cabinets and Coolmaster air
conditioning units), Tanglewood House, Mayfield Avenue, New Haw,
Surrey KT15 3AG
Phone: 01932 348720
E-mail: john@tanglewoodwine.co.uk
Website: www.tanglewoodwine.co.uk
-
The
American Appliance Centre Ltd (UK agents for Transtherm and
Sub-Zero), 5 The Dencora Centre, Dundee Way, Enfield, Middlesex
EN3 7SX
Phone: 020 8443 9999 Fax: 020 8443 9988
E-mail: sales@american-appliance.co.uk
Website: www.american-appliance.co.uk
-
Norcool
Appliances Ltd, Unit 8 London Road Business Park, Retford, Notts DN22
6BR
Phone: 01777 709900 Fax: 01777 719909
E-mail: info@norcool.co.uk
-
Wechillit.com
(supplies Liebherr wine fridges at discounted prices), Unit 3a/3b,
Leighton Centre, Welshpool, Powys SY21 8HJ
Phone: 01938 556688 Fax: 01938 556699
E-mail: info@wechillit.com
Website: www.wechillit.com
In
the USA
Back to top
|