Starting a Wine Cellar

‘Sure, I age wine. For about 20 minutes, enough time to get back from the store and pop the cork.’

At least that's how the joke goes. And there's more than a grain of truth to it: When life revolves around immediate gratification, it's hard to think about waiting 5, 10, 20 years to drink a nice bottle of wine. Indeed, estimates from retailers and market research suggest 80-90% of bottles are consumed within 24 hours, and 90-95% within a week. Commit to starting a cellar, however, and you won't be sorry.

1. Where to start? 

The simple truth is that a cupboard under the stairs will often suffice. Indeed, almost any space that is dark, free from vibrations and strong smells and that has an even temperature (around 12°C) can be turned into a cellar. Companies such as Wine Case can even fit custom-made metal and wooden wine racks in the weirdest-shaped spaces or, if you really have nothing better to do on a Saturday, supply you with your own wine rack-making kit. The key is to ensure that if your bottles are stoppered with corks that they are stored on their sides, at a slight angle, bottle neck down (to prevent the cork drying out). Bottles with screw caps can be stored upright.

As your collection gets more serious – or simply bigger – you might consider investing in a tailor-made wine fridge (I swear by my Samsung, which holds 33 bottles; £249 from John Lewis). You could invest in a fancy bespoke cellar such as the ones provided by Smith & Taylor or Spiral Cellars. Not only does S&T store wine for customers in the company's own warehouses, it also designs and constructs anything from 500-bottle wine cabinets to entire rooms that can hold thousands of bottles (and which can cost upwards of six figures). They look amazing and are as much about showing off some swanky interior design as they are about simply storing bottles of vino. I bet claret-loving designer Kevin McCloud has one. Spiral Cellars, by contrast, specialises in digging holes in the floor of your kitchen, dining room, study, garage, or wherever you see fit, and sinking a watertight, pre-cast cylinder topped with a trap door and lined with shelves with space for almost 2,000 bottles. No need to get rid of the billiards table after all - simply dig under it. 

Finally, don't forget to insure your cellar. Not the plonk in the kitchen, but any purchases of value. And, just so you can remember what you bought when, what needs drinking and what needs leaving alone, invest in a cellar book or computer spreadsheet. Memory can play wretched tricks on one. Especially after a bottle or so. I would recommend using Cellar Tracker; it’s a website that uses wines as a database worldwide, and where your wines can be logged by vintage and region.  

2. What to buy?

Beware. Fruit-forward wines from Australia, New Zealand, North and South America and South Africa typically need to be consumed within 2-3 years. Many European wines also lack the structure necessary to help a wine age gracefully. In fact, there are many variables used to determine a wine’s age worthiness, including a wine’s vintage, varietal, quality, and winemaking techniques used.

The roughly 5% of wines out there suited to aging — the best known being Bordeaux, Barolo, Barbaresco and white and red Burgundies — undergo a wonderful transformation as time passes and oxygen seeps through the cork: dry tannins in big red wines soften, fruit flavours give way to subtle undertones of tobacco, leaves, wood, saddle leather and chocolate. Whites that seem too acidic when young can, with age, come into balance, revealing hints of apples and pears, nuts and buttered toast.

Wines from the following regions and from producers with a long track record for ageing dominate most serious cellars. In reds, that tends to mean Bordeaux and Burgundy, followed by the Rhône Valley, Piedmont (barolo, barbaresco), Tuscany (Chianti Classico, Brunello di Montalcino), and Rioja; for whites it means riesling from Germany, Alsace and Austria, chenin blanc from the Loire, and chardonnay from Burgundy, with dessert wines from Sauternes, Germany and Tokaj, as well as vintage Blanc de Blancs champagne, port and madeira also featuring in the mix.

But it would be wrong to assume that these classics are the only wines worth keeping. We still tend to think of Australian and Californian reds as oaky fruit bombs, but our attitude would be very different if more of us tried their more serious wines with a bit more age. The same is true of the Australian whites, Hunter Valley semillon and Clare or Eden Valley riesling, and I've been impressed with how well some of the reds from Portugal's Douro Valley and France's Languedoc-Roussillon develop. With wines being released ever younger these days, I've found that buying the occasional case of £10 Chilean or Languedoc red, say, and tucking it away for 6 to 12 months can mellow the tannins, allowing the fruit to shine. Non-vintage champagne, too, improves after 18 months' further bottle age.

Look, too, at less familiar regions. My hot tips are the Gimblett Gravels in New Zealand, where soil and climate result in superb Bordeaux-rivalling blends and single-varietal Syrahs (look out for Craggy Range, Trinity Hill, Sacred Hill, Unison, Newton Forrest and Squawking Magpie) and the Douro Valley in Portugal for its new-wave table wines (look for estates such as Quinta do Vale Meão, Quinta do Crasto, Quinta Vale Dona Maria, Quinta do Vallado, Quinta do Portal and Quinta do Vesuvio).

The wine could age better or worse depending on variables such as the vintage or the winemaker's techniques. For example, 1997 and 1999 red wines from Bordeaux should be consumed young, while the same wines grown in 1998 or 2000 could use some time in the cellar. Be sure to check out wine apps such as Hachette on your smart phone for drinking recommendations on individual wines, or drop me a line at info@hampshirewineschool.com if you have any questions or concerns. You can also read the World of Fine Wine or Decanter magazines, as well as Jancis Robison’s Purple Pages.

3. Affordable wines for your cellar, some examples:

• Castello di Potentino Piropo IGT Toscana,Italy 2008 (£13.95, from com) An unusual blend of pinot noir with the chianti grape variety sangiovese and a little of the unheralded alicante from a British expat winemaker, this beautiful Tuscan red is alive with cherry fruit and fresh herbs now, but it could mellow and soften still more over the next half a decade.

• Château du Cèdre Cahors, France 2009(from £15.95, Lea & Sandeman; Roberson) Made from the local côt, aka malbec, a grape variety successfully appropriated by the Argentinians, this is an attractively fleshy and fresh red now, but with a certain gutsy power that will repay a decade or so in the cool and dark.

• Grosset Polish Hill Riesling, Clare Valley, Australia 2012(from £23.95, co.uk; Noel Young Wines; Haynes Hanson & Clark) With its searing, linear, directness, Jeffrey Grosset's crystal clear Aussie Riesling is quite formidable (but cold-water-on-the-face refreshing) when it's young, but will take on layers of toasty limey complexity for many years to come.

• Quinta do Noval Late-Bottled Vintage Port 2004(From £15.60, Ocado; Lea & Sandeman; Cambridge Wine Merchants) The LBV style of port is released when it's ready to drink, and this one has the purring power and chocolate-edged dark fruit to make it a joy right now, but my experience of older vintages suggests it's worth squirreling the odd bottle away for at least a decade.

• Château Poujeaux, Moulis-en-Médoc, Bordeaux, France 2009 (from £25, as part of a case of six bottles, Tesco; Laithwaites). The staple of the classic cellar and the serious collector, red Bordeaux is re-mortgage pricey at the very top end. Look beyond the bigger cru classé names, however, as most world-famous Châteaux also produce second wines, like Alter Ego de Palmer from Château Palmer, as they can be more affordable, if not cheap. Here, Poujeaux's lushly fruited 2009 will keep for more than a decade. The most popular, active wine website for people who want to collect Bordeaux wine is hosted by the world-renown wine writer and critic, Robert Parker (http://dat.erobertparker.com/bboard/).

• Berrys Barolo, Italy 2008(£24.95, Berry Bros & Rudd). Barolo is famously tough and tannic when it's young, but this example from posh merchant Berry Bros very superior own-label range was already quite silky when I tasted it last year, although it has stuffing enough to add to its ethereal rose fragrance for 5 to 10 years.