Building and Storing a Wine Cellar

A serious collector learns early that buying great wine is only half the task. The other half, quieter and often overlooked, is keeping it. Wine is a living thing, still evolving slowly in the bottle, and it is exquisitely sensitive to its surroundings. A bottle that would have been sublime after twenty years in ideal conditions can be dull or spoiled after a few summers in the wrong ones. Building and storing a cellar well is therefore not a luxury but a necessity.

The ideal conditions are easily described and harder to achieve. Wine wants a cool, constant temperature, traditionally around the low fifties in Fahrenheit or roughly eleven to fourteen degrees Celsius, and above all it wants that temperature to be stable, since it is the swings between warm and cold, more than any single reading, that do the damage. It wants steady humidity to keep corks from drying out, darkness to protect it from light, and stillness, away from vibration. It also wants to rest on its side so that the wine stays in contact with the cork. Few ordinary homes provide any of this reliably, which is why a spare cupboard or a kitchen rack is no place for wine meant to be kept.

Collectors solve the problem in one of two ways. Those with the space and inclination build a dedicated cellar, either a naturally cool underground room or, more often, a purpose built space fitted with climate control that holds the conditions precisely. It is the most satisfying solution, keeping the wine close at hand, but it demands real investment and careful engineering to get right.

The alternative, favored by many serious collectors, is professional bonded storage. Specialist warehouses keep wine in perfect, monitored conditions, fully insured and meticulously recorded, and in many countries wine held in bond sits outside the reach of duty and tax until it is withdrawn or sold. Bonded storage carries the further advantage of provenance, since a wine that has never left professional conditions from the moment it left the estate commands a premium when the time comes to sell, a point our guide to provenance explores. For wines bought as an investment, it is often the wisest choice of all.

Whichever path a collector takes, the principle is the same. The finest bottles are bought to be kept for years or decades, and their eventual quality depends as much on how they were stored as on how they were made. Getting the keeping right is the unglamorous foundation on which every great cellar rests, and it is central to the approach set out in our guide to starting a fine wine collection. For advice on cellaring or arranging professional storage, contact us.