Casual Wine Storage

[Stone]

I've got a few bottles of decent wine (i.e., around $100), mostly red. I've got them sitting in a rack on a shelf in my apartment. Not exposed to the sun, but temp in the room fluctuates greatly -- quite warm on sunny days, quite chilly at night. I'm not sure I've got a room with consistently cool temps.

Any suggestions, or should I not worry too much.

[Fat Guy]

You should drink them!

Seriously: if you don't have high-quality storage, you shouldn't try to store expensive wine. It's better to drink them a little early than it is to drink them when they're properly aged but ruined.

[Stone]

I don't have many occasions to drink a $100 bottle of wine. I'm not sure why I buy them. But then again, I'm not sure why I bought a Sony Playstation, roller blades, a home gym, or an ice cream maker either. (That list could go on forever.)

[Fat Guy]

You're in California, dude. Just bring a bottle to a restaurant next time you go out with some friends. Tell them it cost $5000. They won't know the difference.

[Craig Camp]

You're in California, dude. Just bring a bottle to a restaurant next time you go out with some friends. Tell them it cost $5000. They won't know the difference.

Yeah, California is the land where it is OK to BYO almost anywhere. Drink them.

There are so many wonderful wines ready for current consumption. I would avoid these heavy hitters unless I had a place to keep them. Also I am sure there is a place around where you can rent temperature controlled storage - even small lockers.

[Fat Guy]

I wouldn't even bother with professional storage for single bottles of wine purchased retail. The way wine is handled by US retailers, not to mention most distributors and importers, is a joke. The chances of a given bottle being messed up are quite high. If I had the money to be playing the wine storage game seriously, I'd be buying all my stuff directly from the producer or from trusted sources at auction, and I'd buy it in case quantities because no matter what you can always lose a bottle or two to happenstance when you get into long-term cellaring. In other words, drink the damn wine, occasion or no.

[Malik]

There are places around in the Bay Area where you can store your wine in a temperature and humidity controlled environment. I use La Cave in Millbrae, they have lockers of various sizes starting at 9 cases, and charge around $1.50 per case per month. So if you fill your locker (and once you get one you'll be amazed how fast you can do so), it works out to about $1.50 per bottle per year for storage. You can also buy those wine cooler units, Costco had a 32-bottle one for $300 bucks last year.

The simplest solution would be to find some underground spot to keep them in (a friend's basement maybe?). Passive underground storage in the Bay Area is usually sufficient for medium term aging. The glass from the wine bottle acts as an insulator for short term temperature fluctuations (by that I mean day vs night), and combined with the relatively high specific heat of the liquid, means that the actual wine itself shouldn't fluctuate much in temperature over the course of a day.

I know a few wine enthusiasts that store their wine this way. Bruce Cass told me that he stores his wine in a cupboard in his appartment in San Francisco, and he actually has a test bottle with a minimax thermometer immersed in the wine, and has found that the temperature fluctuates at most a couple of degrees over a month. I also asked Kermit Lynch himself about storage once, he keeps his wine in the basement of his house in Berkeley, and he lets it age there for decades.

I found it interesting that these two guys who know a lot more about wine that I probably ever will were so casual about storage. There are plenty of people that will tell you the opposite though, I think Robert Parker for example is much more concerned about storage. The main reason I went the route of the locker and a small fridge at home is that in my old appartment, it would get to over 100F in the daytime during the summer heat waves, and would not cool to much below 80 by morning. I definitely had some bottles that were spoiled in that environment.

[ctgm]

If I had the money to be playing the wine storage game seriously, I'd be buying all my stuff directly from the producer or from trusted sources at auction

Trusted sources at auction??? And where do they get there stocks from? Presumably from people who have stored the wine in bad conditions as well as those that are kept in good conditions. I would never consider buying really expensive wine from auction as the providence is not always as easy and straight forward as is declaredn (if declared at all).