You’ll probably become one sooner or later. You may be one without knowing it.
Wine collectors often come by the position accidentally. You start taking in more bottles than you consume in a week and, suddenly, you find yourself at Ikea loading up the hatchback with GORM bottle racks.
When most of us imagine a wine cellar, we picture a large room with floor-to-ceiling racks filled with hundreds of bottles. But cellars can be much more modest than that. A self-described “wine novice,” Darren Trost in Scarborough, Ont., recently installed one of those convenient, under-counter 20-bottle wine fridges as part of a kitchen renovation and wrote asking me for suggestions on stocking it.
A fun mental exercise, I thought, and a relevant question for many condo dwellers just starting out in the collecting game.
What’s the ideal mix for a contemporary micro-cellar?
The more I pondered the question, the more challenging it seemed. Wine collecting is a lot like interior decorating, or writing: relatively easy if you’ve got all the room in the world, tougher when space is tight.
It’s critical to recognize that a cellar, even a micro-cellar, has a dual function. It should be a place to store wine for current consumption – analogous to a food pantry – as well as for short- and long-term cellaring.
I have my own cellaring biases, among them vintage champagne, white Burgundy and Rhone Valley reds – versatile, elegant wines that embrace a smorgasbord of foods. They drink nicely soon after release and often can pay huge dividends in terms of flavour complexity with five to 10 years in the cellar.
White Burgundies can develop honeyed richness, notes of roasted nuts and a mouth-tickling tang. From the Rhone Valley, consider a red from the great 2007 harvest from such districts as Gigondas, Vacqueyras and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, such as the superb, but hard-to-find Domaine La Garrigue Vacqueyras 2007 ($22.95).
For the same reasons but to a lesser degree, I’m also a fan of Tuscan reds, dry to off-dry German and Alsatian rieslings and quality red Burgundy, which are always made from pinot noir. Among Tuscan reds, consider a great-value red that would be a welcome sight at most dinner parties, Altesino Rosso 2007 ($19.95 in Ontario, $22.99 in B.C.).
And I have what many might consider idiosyncratic preferences, such as Australian semillon, which develops a honey-like richness and electric tang with five to 15 years in the cellar, and Chilean cabernet sauvignon, the poor man’s Bordeaux alternative for a steak or roast-beef or lamb main course. (Brown bag an old Chilean cab and some of your guests may mistake it for a much more expensive Bordeaux.)
The great thing about Chilean cabs is that they are acquiring a good track record of age-worthiness but have not yet broken into the auction market in a significant way, so prices remain very down to earth. I’ve tasted 10-year-old examples of the widely available and inexpensive Santa Rita Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon that were delicious. Current price: $14.99 in British Columbia and $13.95 in Ontario.
If the budget permits, I’d also suggest splurging on a couple of relatively under-priced blue-chip Bordeaux, such as Lynch Bages (a $139 fifth growth deserving of second-growth status) and Château Grand-Puy-Lacoste (also an age-worthy fifth growth that merits an upgrade). These wines can age beautifully for two decades or more under cool, moist cellar conditions.
I also put out calls to two cellar experts for general advice and a few more specific suggestions. Peter D. Meltzer has been a long-time New York-based wine critic and auction correspondent for Wine Spectator magazine and is author of the very good book Keys to the Cellar: Strategies and Secrets of Wine Collecting (Wiley).
Warren Porter is president of Iron Gate Private Wine Management, a Toronto-based service that stores wine for collectors in a special temperature-controlled facility. There’s nothing like learning from the mistakes of rich people, and that’s what these guys have had the benefit of doing.
