Wine World

My primary collecting passions, however, are music, books and wine. My iPod lets me organize my music collection, but there’s no substitute for a formal library or wine cellar for the other two. My books sit in giant Tupperware boxes in the attic, and my wine collection lies scattered among friends’ cellars and in self-storage facilities. During a recent addition to our home, space was created between our existing kitchen and a new exterior wall. Since we couldn’t relocate the kitchen, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to build a wine cellar.

I’ve been in dozens of cellars over the years, from the fancy to the utilitarian, and have developed some firmly held beliefs of my own. For example, I am not a big fan of rounded corner racks, which are expensive and hold a pitifully small number of bottles. Another wine cellar accoutrement I can live without is a table and chairs. Wine cellars are cold—usually around 55 degrees. Southwest Florida is warm. It is not pleasant to go from a hot patio into a cold cellar for any length of time. My goal in a wine cellar is to get in, find the bottles I’m looking for, and get out. Making matters more puzzling is that red wines show poorly at 55 degrees, as the cold dampens the fruit and heightens the astringency of the tannins. Conversely, few white wines show their best at that temperature and need a bit more chill. So why would anyone sit in a wine cellar and risk hypothermia only to drink poorly showing wines?

I also believe that a monolithic wine cellar is a mistake. Single-bottle racks maximize convenience, but dramatically decrease the storage capacity of the cellar. A cellar comprised mainly of bins maximizes storage, but creates problems of its own. For a case of 2000 Bordeaux slumbering peacefully for a decade, bins work perfectly. When you are down to just a few bottles of orphaned wines—and the bottle you are looking for is at the bottom—it’s a pain to pull out 15 bottles to get the one you want. For reasons not precisely clear to me, perhaps self-preservation, the bottle I want always seems to have crawled to the bottom of the bin. A blend of bins and single-bottle storage offers the best combination of capacity and convenience.

The size of the single-bottle racks is an additional concern. Modern wine bottles are often longer than their historic counterparts, and a 12-inch depth is no longer sufficient. Another growing trend is the use of bottles that have bulges in them, whether at the shoulder, such as Mondavi Reserve, or at their base. Extreme examples, such as Turley, Pax and many champagne bottles, are so wide at their base that they will not fit into a standard single-bottle rack.

Like many collectors, I’ve made the mistake of trying to balance these types of bottles precariously upon each other in a bin, creating a phenomenon referred to as an avalanche. Many a collector has found himself pinned to the bins, faced sideways, the neck of a bottle impaled in a cheek, outstretched arms pressed against an inexorable flow of bottles.

As I collect a fair amount of Turley wines and have survived an avalanche or two, I knew it would be important to allow for oversized bottles in the single-bottle racks. Several manufacturers make racks spaced wider than normal to accommodate unusual bottles. This is an important consideration, as jamming a wine bottle that is slightly too large into a single-bottle rack tears its label, both on insertion and removal. It is never impressive to show up to a tasting with a trophy bottle whose label appears as if it had been ravaged by raccoons.

The solution is to incorporate champagne and magnum bottle racks into your design. This allows normal bottles to be stacked appropriately into bins, and odd-sized bottles plus orphans to be put into a single-bottle rack design that incorporates all of the bottles in the collection.

Not only is Southwest Florida blessed with a number of local craftsmen who are capable of designing and crafting such a cellar for you, national companies such as Apex Wine Cellars and Vigilant Inc. will also assist you in the design of your perfect cellar and construct the racks for you. Apex has the advantage of its own installation team and offers several types of wood to choose from, including cedar, redwood and several South American, Asian and African woods like luan, meranti, sapele and khaya.

I opted for vigilant’s single-bottle racks, as I was able to work directly with the designers to create the visual effect that I was looking for, along with sufficient magnum and champagne storage to accommodate my Turleys. I’m very pleased with Vigilant’s racking but, since its racks come only partially assembled, the services of a good carpenter are required to finish their installation. At this point, I have my wine cellar, and I’m surprised at how quickly it filled up. Apparently, I had more wines sequestered around town than I had realized, leading to my last piece of advice: Always build your wine
cellar twice as large as you think you really need.