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RETIREMENT & LIFESTYLE PLANNING | |
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| ISSUE - 17 - APRIL 2003 | |
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Even if it’s just a few cases here and there under the stairs or the spare bed, a modest cellar might be enough. Imagine that you only want to drink a single mature bottle of wine every week, or about fifty a year, and that you’d be happy if they’ve been aged for around five years after purchase. Then you’re only going to need room for about 250-300 bottles. Sounds a lot, but twenty to twenty-five cases don’t really take up all that much space.
There’s no need to buy it all at once, although you could perhaps buy a different bottle each week of the year to put into your cellar. But it’s often more sensible to buy wines in minimum allocations of three.
If you only buy single bottles of each wine, you’ll miss the pleasure involved in tracking a wine’s progress over a few years, which is an essential part of the fun in owning a wine cellar.
There’s also no desperate need to spend more than $15 per bottle to have a choice across a wide range of perfectly suitable wines to cellar for five years. Then five years after you started your collection, you’ll be able to start dipping into the wines you bought in year one.
From that moment onwards for the rest of your life, provided you keep depositing fifty each year, that’s the number of bottles you can commence to withdraw.
Setting up your cellar
If a bottle of wine is kept in a place where the temperature is not constant from day to night and relatively stable from season to season, things usually go awry. After a couple of days, the longer you leave wines exposed to changing temperatures, the greater is the risk of losing the magic.
For starters, never leave wine near a window. Wine needs a constant, but cool temperature (ideally, around 11-14C) so if you have to leave it next to an external wall, make sure it’s either thick or well insulated. Similarly, avoid permanent household fixtures that might generate heat, such as heating banks or air conditioners.
Be careful about keeping bottles for a long time above 20 degrees, since that might be a little too warm for wines to ultimately reveal their true potential. If you’re not certain what the temperature does where your wine is cellared, get a maximum-minimum thermometer and plot its progress for a week. If that looks okay, then plot weekly figures for the next year.
Wine also needs darkness and a lack of vibration. If you have little choice in your house but to build wine racking down a well-lit wall or corridor, it might be a good idea to install a long dark curtain along its length to protect the bottles from any light damage. You don’t want to keep your wine in a totally dry atmosphere, since some humidity can help to maintain the cork’s moisture content and its ability to seal at the top end of the bottle. If you think your cellar might be a little too dry, all you need to do is to regularly top up a container of water in the vicinity of the wine.
Remember to keep all your wines on their side, or upside down in their boxes, so their corks remain moist at the business end.
The only wines you can afford to store standing upright are bottles of blended fortified wines such as tawny ports, muscats, tokays and sherries. Vintage ports, which age like highly alcoholic red wines, must be kept on their sides.
Sparkling wines, be they red or white, must be kept lying down.
If an insulated or underground wine cellar is out of the question, give yourself a birthday present and lash out on a refrigerated and humidity-controlled wine cabinet.
The price for a 144-bottle cabinet is $3000 plus. Or put your wine into one of the growing number of commercial wine cellaring facilities popping up in the major cities. Or else move out of your apartment.
Popular cellaring wines
Lower Hunter Valley Semillon
Clare Valley Riesling
Eden Valley Riesling
Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon
Margaret River Cabernet blends
Great Western Shiraz Rutherglen
Shiraz Barossa Valley ShirazWhat grape varieties do with age
Wine doesn’t simply become a more intense or expressive version of what it might have been in its youth - it actually evolves, undergoing sometimes dramatic changes in colour, smell and taste.
Of all aspects of wine appreciation, the process of ageing is one of the most complex and least understood.
How the palate matures
Just as their colours become deeper and darker with time, the palate of white wines firstly becomes richer and rounder, before sliding towards an inevitable decay. While some pinot noirs will ‘build’ in the bottle over their first two years in glass, most red wines begin a gradual process of refinement and ever-increasing restraint as they mature. As wines become older, their ability to impart a discernible effect from tannin reduces and they become noticeably softer and smoother to drink.
Taking advice: do medals and glowing reviews matter?
Medals won by wines at shows are absolutely no indication whatsoever of cellaring potential.
It’s simply not what judges look for.
The best tip for dealing with any wine writer, including myself, is to determine for yourself whether or not you feel comfortable with his or her taste. If you find a writer you agree with, stick by him or her. Similarly, a writer’s reputation counts for naught if you don’t enjoy his or her recommendations.
How to store wine
If you’re going to buy at least some of your wine in dozen lots, you’re going to need bins large enough to handle those. But, as time progresses, you might like to move depleted dozens into half dozen bins. And then into single bottles, as you get right down to the business end of it all. So, while many cellar storage shelves consist of single bottle holders or slots, which are the most space inefficient of all bin sizes, why not think about a mix of dozen-bottle bins, half-dozen bins and single bottle slots? My list is on computer so it’s relatively easy to find the bin any given bottle should be in.
Therefore I don’t need any single bottle bins or slots.
If you have more than a couple of hundred bottles of wine or are laying down wine 3 30/3/03, 10:41:15 PM expecting to collect that number, sooner or later you’re going to need to keep some form of record system, even if it’s just the most basic of written lists.
There’s another vital reason to record your cellar stock, even if you think you could remember it all. The insurance claim, (Lord hope you never need to make one). Insurance companies are regularly greeted by the sight of deeply saddened wine collectors, shuffling up with stories of floods, fire and theft. Without a cellar list, how will you ever receive an accurate estimation of your cellar’s worth? A stray tip worth remembering, is that it will take a thief a lot more time to remove twelve unpacked bottles of wine than a conveniently stacked and unopened dozen. So unpack your wine, if you can.
Drinking cellars vs investment cellars
Don’t think about buying wine for investment purposes unless you’re prepared to make it a major business. Then you’ll need a perfect cellar, plus loads of access to the wines that everyone else wants to collect, the few that really show some potential for serious return.
The best Australian investment wines fall into two categories, cult and classic. Led by Grange, the classic investment wines are those like Henschke’s Hill of Grace and Mount Mary Cabernets - wines which over the years have developed a proven track record for quality and investment return. Langton’s Classification of Distinguished Wine, a catalogue of such wines developed and maintained by Australia’s largest and most influential auction house, is as thorough a listing of these wines as you can get.
On the other hand, recent years have seen the emergence of a number of small wineries whose tiny productions - typically of old-vine shiraz - now sell at stratospheric prices. Wines from makers like Torbreck, Wild Duck Creek, Three Rivers, Greenock Creek, Veritas, Noons and the Burge Family have become the hottest-performing wines on the Australian auction market, before they are quickly shipped off to the US for resale.
Some basic rules for buying investment wines
- Stick with established brands, large and small.
- Avoid poor or ordinary vintages as you would a communicable disease.
- If you buy in dozens, unopened boxes are best.
- Just because a currently available wine is expensive, it doesn’t mean that (a) it is any good, and (b) that it will appreciate in value.
- Right now, shiraz is king, and it’s unlikely that the overseas buyers who are currently driving up prices will switch their tastes to other Australian varieties where our advantage is not so distinctive.
- Magnums cost more than they should in Australia, but do appreciate quickly.
- Before you buy or sell, check not only the track record of the agent or auction house, but the selling and buying commissions applicable.
- Make sure your purchases come from a reputable agent and cellar.
- Be aware that most of the premium brands have already experienced their dramatic period of resale price growth.
- Think again before you sell it. It might be more fun to drink it.
for storage:
www.onwine.com.au
www.langtons.com.au
www.transtherm.com
www.kleenmaid.com.au
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Email: publisher@yourlifechoices.com.auIS PUBLISHED BY
Copyright Retirement Publishing Pty Ltd 2001 -- ISSN 1031-6620 ACN 088 049 218
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