The Auswine Forum

Having only started to take a serious interest in building a decent wine collection over the last 6 months i'm suprised at how quickly i have started to amass a reasonable number of bottles. 10-12 cases at last count althought may even be more now !!

One thing struck me is it must be very easy to build a serious collection over a 5-10 year + period.

So the question is how big is your collection and where the hell do you keep it all???

Living in a unit in sydney i'm not exactly overun with space and my offsite storage starts getting a little pricey after a while. I've thought about making a 2nd temporary cellar in the spare room but the conditions are far from ideal with temps ranging between 19c & 27c with humidity between 46 and 91% (Highs/lows over a 2 month period) even in the most stable room in the house.

Short of winning powerball i'm struggling for ideas

Hi action,

Been working on my collection for 7 days. Amassed a total of 47..........bottles. Stored in styrofoam boxes under the bed - I have sufficient space and styrofoam boxes for 20 cases. Expect to have them filled in 3 years.

Regards,

Allan

............now for the big boys and girls!!!

This is what we do in Florida, where no basements by Building Code are allowed.

Step one: by a fridge from Sears with no Freezing Camera
cost - $499 US, capacity - 9-10 cases

Step 2: buy WineStat
http://www.winestat.com/
cost around $170 US + shipping

it maintains any temperature your heart desires betweem 10C and 20C
and serves as an economical solution to the wine storage problem.

Here is some pics:
http://www.winetalk.com/gallery/browsei ... all&page=2

Installation takes 1 min flat and no Electrical Degree required

The first thing that you need to accept is that you never stop collecting.
Once it's in the blood, (pardon the pun) you're hooked.

Some people say 7 - 10 years worth of drinking is a good amount of bottles to keep. For a decent cellar I think 1,000 bottles is the minimum.
You will be suprised at how you could stand in your cellar looking at 1,000 plus bottles and not know what to pick. Strangely believing you don't have enough.

Take the plunge and buy a "thermo cabinet". Offsite storage is good, but nothing like standing in front of your collection contemplating the next great bottle. About $5,000 should get you storage for 500-700 bottles.

It's all too easy and more to the point, scary how quickly the wine cellar can explode. I was buying many wines over the internet getting them delivered to an off site wine storage facility in Aus while I was in Switzerland. 3 years later I returned home to just over 2500 bottles of the good stuff.

Now our 4 bedroom house is a 3 bedroom house with a wine cellar. Put in a 2hp inverter and a temp and humidity monitor, designed and built my own wine racks and viola. All good apart from the 2003 wine crash, one of the racks burst and I lost 120 bottles of very good wine. Have since made significant improvements to the design.

Anyway, I now maintain the 2500 bottles, basically drink a few, buy a few etc and more importantly am now buying wine that I have tasted and like. Too many wines bought based on high JH, JO scores etc without tasting and now finding many not to my liking. Oh well, there are worse jobs to do than sample the wines purchased.

As mentioned earlier, quite often I find myself staring at walls of wine thinking there is nothing to drink and only if I had purchased...

Cheers
Jeff

I've been buying more or less seriously since 1995 and went from a kitchen rack (4 Doz) to a hole dug under our floorboards (imagine circular saw through the floorboards only to discover dirt at the joists - out came the shovel!) (10 Doz) to professional storage (50 doz) to purpose built air conditioned cellar in my home (120+ doz).

Gianna is correct in everything she says, especially about the never stop collecting and the looking at 1000 bottles and not being able to find something to drink although now I'm at the stage of wondering how the hell I'm going to drink it all as a lot of it is suddenly maturing at the same time.

I now need to go on a maintenance type program - drink and buy in similar quantities. Easier said than done.

bacchaebabe wrote:Gianna is correct in everything she says,...

btw.Gianna is maschile

btw.Gianna is maschile

No kidding ? ........I wouldn't have known
Oh, and mine is 298 btls in a 500 Vintage-keeper, and I fully resolve to drink my wines before I EVER overflow................forever more, and that's a promise - Because 500 bottles of wine is almost gluttony, especially when you are '-cash' poor
Visit my MC statement...... it's ALL wine charges

The first wines I bought for storage for when I was 17, so I have been collecting wine for over 35 years. During that time, I have had all sorts of the inadequate storage facilitiesand in those days professional storage was not easily available.

First it was under the bed, then for a five-year period I was lucky enough to have access to a tiny vacant office that faced the light shaft and had a very constant cool temperature. When I had to pull my wine out of there, each bottle went into their ownin dividual hexiaginal agricultural pipe. These were located in the study between two concrete support beans. After that, the wine was stored in the lock-up garage, which luckily was located underground. even then it wasn't ideal.

From their my wine spent a few years and my sister's cellar, and although it was passive, the house is a federation house and the cellar was perfect.

During that entire period of time, my collection would have been around 400 mark. I didn't want it to get any bigger, as inadequate storage was too much of a risk. Once I bought my pet shop business, I had lots of room at the back of an old Federation building with walls are about 3 feet thick. Although it was slightly to hot in summer and to cold in winter, the daily temperature fluctuations were negligible and the wine did not seem to suffer.

That was when my haven't really became bad. It grew from 400 to well over 2000, and at one stage was getting very close to 2500. Thankfully it has reduced a bit since then, but there is still more than enough to drink. I'm still trying to reduce it and think that about 2000 is the perfect number for me. As a result, I have bought very little for some months, which also make fine while the wine industry sales are down.

My cellar was finally air-conditioned when the landlord put a new roof on the building and the metal was strong enough to hold the weight of the unit.

No fancy thermostats for me, at least until our mortgage stops biting. I have about 500 bottles, kept in four places:

A standing wine cupboard. Used for good reds which are deemed to be ready to drink. Probably fits two cases, plus spirits, fortifieds and some stickies. Not intended for long-term cellaring, but some bottles have been undisturbed for two years.

The cupboard under the stairs. Fits about 30 cases, probably more if we packed it intelligently. On an external wall which is adjacent to another house, so it shouldn't be getting too much heat through the wall. Like our house, this cupboard isn't air-conditioned, but I don't think it fluctuates too wildly.

Upstairs cupboard. About ten cases of wine have been edging out towels and sheets into other cupboards. Less than ideal since the front of the cupboard sees some sunlight through a skylight. Used mostly for cheaper cases.

Lounge room floor. Not ideal, not least because it spells out to my wife how much we have. At the moment, about five cases.

Kieran

...better make that 77 bottles - from what I can tell there would appear to be only 20 cases of the Paul Osicka 2002 Cabernet available (all at the Oak Barrel in Sydney) had to get another case and a half and grabbed a case of the 2002 shiraz while I was there. Straight into the "cellar under the bed". Oh my aching mastercard!

Allan

I agree with Gianna.
My cellar has just tipped over the 1000 amrk, and I still see holkes in it to fill (as in gaps in styles/vinatge etc).
Ive now decided to spend more on French and only pick the eyes out of the oz vinatges ( oh.. except for...and...and maybe... and before you know it your at 1250!!).

Welcome back Swisscorrespondant!

Rory

I agree with Gianna.
My cellar has just tipped over the 1000 amrk, and I still see holkes in it to fill (as in gaps in styles/vinatge etc).
Ive now decided to spend more on French and only pick the eyes out of the oz vinatges ( oh.. except for...and...and maybe... and before you know it your at 1250!!).

Welcome back Swisscorrespondant!

Rory

I've only about 300 bottles, reasonably varied though. The 'ready now' bottles are stored in small wine fridges, the rest are offsite in a reasonable, stable climate. What's missing can usually be filled in from auctions on a month-to-month basis. Lack of cash and space limits growth right now. Anybody have free cellaring space in Sydney? I would love to have a cavernous, 10,000+ bottle underground cellar one day. Then, why stop at one?

Part of my saga on wine storage is here. I first started putting bottles away in the mid 1970's. The locations were usually cupboards in shared accommodations while I was single and then later when I was first married. The over flow ended up in my mum's garage which was sort of underground (the house was built into the side of a hill). I moved to the US in 1982, back to Oz in 1985 and then back to the US in 1987 - selling or drinking my cellar each time and the first wife disappeared along the way as well. I never worried too much about optimal wine storage until I came back to the US and started to buy wines from one of the wine shops here in San Diego and realized that the Aussie wines they sold tasted way better that they did back home. It took me a couple of annual trips back home (by then my mother had retired back to Dubbo) to realize that it was the storage conditions that were making all the difference. OK summer in Dubbo is a pretty dramatic example, but it makes the point!

I joke about it now but for years all I was doing in my early "collecting" phase was making expensive vinegar. I spent the 1990s tasting a lot of wine but not buying that much to cellar. When I did I stored it in as cool a position as I could - my airconditioned office! Not optimal as the humidity is too low, a duh moment if there ever was one! But at least cool.

Everything is now in a Vintage Keeper (500+ bottle capacity). Its getting very full. The second wife keeps wondering when we will ever have time to drink all this wine. I keep wondering if there is space for a second Vintage Keeper, or if I should start to store wine back in Oz for my retirement!

All this BS leads up to the only advice I have for those who have wine in cupboards and other less than optimal storage places. If the wine is important to you, if you really want to see how it will mature with age then please get yourself access to the best cellaring conditions you can. If you have to spend money to do it, then so be it. In the end you will be rewarded.

Mike

My first serious cellar was under the house circa 1974, gradually buiding up to about 80 dozen then dropping by half in 1981 when I separated and divorced.

When I moved to my current house there was a big walk-in cupboard, brick walls, coolest part on the ground floor of a double-storey house, but hell to manage if you wanted a wine that was three rows in and on a low level, lots of moving of boxes in and out, but it held over 40 cases in fairly stable conditions, plus overflow under the stairs.

About 9 years ago, after much planning, we put a concrete slab on top of the front double brick-enclosed courtyard and moved the patio upstairs, so now I have a cellar that is a quarter circle on a 5 metre radius and opens off the dining room (that can be costly at times - "pick another wine, any wine").

It's set up with a mixture of shelving, in "library" style:

There is polystyrene foam insulation under the slab and a standard domestic split system air-conditioner, keeps it around 16-17 degrees in summer, 14-15 degrees in winter.

Many of the shelves are old bookcases, braced and divided in many cases:



I planned to go into retirement with about 10 year's worth of red wine (bottle a day on average, to allow for wine dinners, gifts/sale to friends, auctions etc), I reached that a while ago and retired (at least for the first time) last week.

Management is via my own RB Cellar Master software, I keep an old Dell notebook PC in there, connected to the wireless network to update the database. I'm overdue for a stocktake to re-discover all the bottles I've moved without updating the database.


Let the drinking begin!

Red Bigot wrote:Let the drinking begin!

Sounds like a good idea, I'll see you tomorrow night!

mozzarella wrote:

bacchaebabe wrote:Gianna is correct in everything she says,...

btw.Gianna is maschile

Gianna is feminine
Gianni is masculine

Gianna Nannini (female singer)

Gianni Versace (fashion)

Buzz

Gianna is my surname:

I AM A BLOKE !!!! (just to sort out any confusion)

I start collecting wines seven years ago and have around 4000+ bottles now. I build a cellar in a 25 square meter room which in the lowest level of my house and it is air-conditioned. The temp is around 17-19 and the hum is around 60-70. It hold around 3500 bottles and the rest is store in three Eurocave wine cellars which sit in my office. I keep telling myself to stop buying but I can`t! Even harder than to lose weight!

I would like to show my cellar photo to you guys here but I don`t know how to attach a photo in the message....

jacques wrote:I would like to show my cellar photo to you guys here but I don`t know how to attach a photo in the message....

jacques,

You need to find a web site that allows you to upload pictures (.gif or .jpg format), then you just include the url in an Img tag in your post. This is what I did in my post above, the images live on my personal web space at TPG.

Your ISP may provide this facility (personal web space) or Hotmail / Yahoo and various other specialised sites allow you to post pictures for free (usually advertisement supported).

Brian,

Great photos of your cellar. Thanks for sharing them. Just a quick question. How do you arrange your bottles within the racks? By varietial, winery, year, etc or do you not bother with this and rely on your software to let you know where certain bottles are. The reason for the question is I am currently setting up a cellar (not as big as yours though) and would like some feedback on what is the most effective way to arrange bottles within the racks.

Thanks in advance

AJ

apjordan wrote:Just a quick question. How do you arrange your bottles within the racks? By varietial, winery, year, etc or do you not bother with this and rely on your software to let you know where certain bottles are.

Hi AJ,

Each bin has a single vintage, I don't worry about varietals, winery, region etc. Each bookcase/rack has an alpha letter, each bin a number, so B3R is the 3rd level from bottom, right-hand bin on bookcase B, the software does the rest. I also have some in original/other cases stacked up on metal shelving or just on the floor or on top of the bookcases.

Other considerations are bottle shape, the "burgundy" slope shouldered and tapered bottles are a pain for stacking bottle-on-bottle, so end up on the top row of a bin or in original cases. I need to stack bottle on bottle as I would need twice the space for single bottle racking. I've not yet broken a bottle getting a wine from mid-bin in 9 years of this cellar, come close a couple of times though

Hope that helps you, it works for me, as long as I update the database when I consolidate bins etc, I usually do an annual stocktake to re-discover stuff I didn't update.

AJ,

If you have a good sysyem (like the Red Bigot Data Base, it doesnt matter where they are, its easy to find.

Jacques,

If you donn't have web hosting facilities, send me the files torb@torbwine.com and I will upload them for you.

Hi guys

There is a saying that goes "Its not how big it is, it is how you use it that counts". Not a saying I use too often myself but it may apply to cellars

Ive had a cellar for about 10 years. After a rapid rise from a dozen to 300, for the last 7 years I have sat around the 300-320 bottle mark.

150 of the flashest wines are at 12oC in a bosch cabinet and the rest in a wardrobe downstairs at reasonable temperatures

I drink about 1-2 top bottles a week so that gives approx 5 years average bottle age which is about right I think. About 50-100 wines you would want more age (around 10 years) but most (whites) you want less.

I buy Sauvignon Blanc and drink it within a month
I cellar riesling (90 bottles) - up to 10 years but mainly 3-5 years
I cellar a few worthy chardonnays (<20) but find a good drink now chardy is available at any wine shop so why bother
Good pinots (<>25) I see do respond to good cellar conditions and a good NZ one will do 10 years. A martinborogh res 96 I had a couple of years ago was a sensation
I then have a number of french, aussie and kiwi bdx blends (120) but im very fussy with vintage and pick very very carefully (piles of 98 nz reds and a few from other vintages such as 00,96,95). Increasing amounts of kiwi syrah (15+).
Have a backbone of top rung aussie shiraz (<>70) mainly from 96.

Many people I think have too many bottles and as a result drink a number of their bottles after peak, I seem to always have enough top end wines and seem to just buy cheaper ones more often so they hardly end up in the cellar.

In the end for me I try to keep wine under the 'obsession threshold'. Plan to keep the family and other interests with a supply of discretionary spending. Also too much drinking usually includes too much eating and not enough exercise, expanding waistlines bla bla, i enjoy keeping fit and need to manage the conflicts caused!!

Also I buy cheaper now than I ever have. The flash wines I drink id say 95% of them I bought over 6 years ago (piles of 96 aussie reds, 94s etc). For $21 I can buy things like peg bay riesling which I find impresses friends just as much or more than fine bdx blends. It cellars, and its yum. Buying top cheap wines is a skill, buying top expensive wines any fool can do

I buy to a strict plan and have no problems passing by a 'latest must have' and leaving it on the shelf.

Anyway - Just to encourage those that cant afford 1000+ bottles that you can have a just as rewarding hobby with a lot less and I know many that enjoy the wine game with half the size cellar that i have even

C.

Craig(NZ). wrote:There is a saying that goes "Its not how big it is, it is how you use it that counts". Not a saying I use too often myself but it may apply to cellars

Last I heard, this theory has been somewhat de-bunked.

I agree with most of what you say Craig, you can drink well from a cellar of a few hundred bottles, but life is about choice and I'm in a position to choose to keep a lot more at this stage of my life. The reasons for this are:

There are two of us RB's drinking, we mostly like the same wines.

I can afford it, my only child is self-supporting, I don't have a mortgage, I don't have any other expensive hobbies, my partner earns a good salary.

I can afford to send mistakes/ready-before-I-am off to auction (about 6 dozen last year), or to friends (selected wines, see next point).

As well as my own drinking, I mix up packs of recent and older vintages for friends who don't keep cellars or people who are just getting into wine, I would have made up about 8 cases like this last year.

Wines from my cellar provide enjoyment to others at wine tastings and wine dinners, either for free or near cost, about 6-7 dozen went that way last year (maybe more, haven't done a detailed check), a dinner tonight will consume about 20 bottles from my cellar.

I have time to exercise, and do, to combat the effects of the lovely food that the wine accompanies.

Most of the wine I buy I prefer to drink around 7-8 years of age, some make it to 10 or 15 years before they have peaked for my palate and (at least until some fairly recent auction results), most of the wine I buy is cheapest at release. I'd prefer to trust my cellar than an unknown someone else's anyway.

That makes about 250 bottles ex-cellar last year without counting personal consumption.

So, although some (maybe many) would think it excessive or obsessive, to me it is simply a lifestyle choice that I have made for future enjoyment and in some cases for the enjoyment of my friends.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the advance and I will try to figure it out how to do it later.

Torb,

Send you the photo already, please help me to upload it. Havent got time to put all the wines in the rack yet, half of them are still in the boxes.

Gianna.. wrote:Gianna is my surname:

I AM A BLOKE !!!! (just to sort out any confusion)

Sorry about that. I guess I was wishfully thinking there was more girls on the forum.

Very clear now though.

My philosophy is pretty much summed up by Craig's post. My cellar's been going for not-quite 10 years. After a few years in an air-conditioned bachelor's flat, I faced the crunch after marriage and the first rental house. Inspired by Tyson Stelzer's bizarre cellar construction experiments, I went ahead, sold a French horn and with the resultant $1500 proceeded to build something similar, if not quite so grand or sophisticated. So there is capacity for 432 x 750 and 22 halfs in an insulated cabinet, with enough cooling capacity to cap off summer at about 20C. Daily temp fluctuation only 2C. There were some photos on a thread on W* - too hard to find now!

cheers,
Graeme

obsession isnt all bad. without obsession no one would excel at anything. The grandest and greatest of everything in the world seems to have been driven from obsession, i dont have anything against it....as long as im the one not caught up in it hehe

bought myself 1x 750mls 97 Ch 'd'Yquem yesterday, so occassionally I let myself dabble in madness as well.

A couple more points

1. I probaley have a greater enjoyment for NZ wines and whites. Both of which require less cellar time to reach optimum so at the same consumption levels I require a smaller cellar than a big aussie red bigot

2.

That makes about 250 bottles ex-cellar last year without counting personal consumption.

. I drink nothing close to this so horses for courses.

My main aim wasnt to say anyone with x bottles in their cellar was mad per se but just to bring another angle that it is possible to really have a full and great wine cellar with well south of the 1000 bottles someone suggested within this thread.

C