I was recently talking to a group of people with no wine knowledge at a newbie intro to wine session. The third question asked that evening: “How do you start your own wine cellar”. That one caught me, deer-in-the-headlights style, for a full second. How to sum that up to someone, with little or no wine knowledge, in just a few minutes? I evaded the question that night, but here are my thoughts, now that I’ve had some time to think about how to answer.

The entire question comes down to three main themes. 1. Where to store it. 2. What to buy. 3. How much to buy.

Number 1 is easy.  If you can afford a wine fridge or an environmentally-controlled wine cellar, or professional off-site storage space, terrific.  Especially if they can store the quantities required by Question Number 3.

BUT, depending on the answers to Question Number 2, a fridge may not even be necessary, and some people might be better off investing the money required for fancy equipment in actual bottles of wine instead.

Further thoughts on #1. To keep things simple I’m going to grossly over simplify matters by saying that if you are going to ever have more than 24 bottles of $100+ wines in your cellar that yes, you should buy a fridge. If you even secretly hope you will resell a bottle in your cellar at a profit 10+ years down the road, yes, you need to install a fancy climate-controlled cellar.  And if, you are buying Bordeaux first growths as futures or are making plans to buy for a vertical tasting of Corton from your favourite producer at your unborn child’s 16th birthday, well, yes, you should join a professional wine storage facility. (They should have a well-equipped party room for after-hours entertainment as a bonus feature – I’m available to host after hours wine tastings!!)

But, for most people, especially here in North America, where we tend to have a palate for younger wines, this is unnecessary.  So, on to “Number 1 for the rest of us”.

And actually, that means starting with Number 2. What to buy.

Let’s assume all wines can be summed up as:

A) wines you can buy and drink today

B) wines you can buy, but won’t want to drink for some time (let’s assume 5+ years)

C) wines you can do either with (yes, there really are such things!)

For A), why stock up, except to know you have them on hand in case of “emergencies”? Or dinner. Snow days. That kind of thing. For me, I stock cava, you’ll never find less than two bottles in my house. Plus probably 6 bottles of three different whites that I haven’t tasted but that experience tells me I’ll probably like. And a case of a fresh red meant for early consumption or a medium-term aged red from an affordable wine region. These are the bottles I reach for without thinking, the bottles my husband and his friends can drink without incurring my wrath (my husband knows never to touch the riesling unless Raja’s coming over), the wines I’m happy to serve anyone any amount of at any time.

Activity:

Walk around your local wine shop. Take a note of every wine on the shelf you know you like as is, right now. These are category A), and in my opinion, you don’t need more than a month’s supply of these, unless you really hate going to the store.  Figure out how many bottles that works out to. Don’t have any of these? Head to a store with a tasting bar and find some. Taste them – think you like them? Buy 3. Really, you deserve it.

Onto B). Wines for aging.  If you have no idea at all what wines might belong in this category, well, here’s your chance to experiment a little.  We’re talking $35+ per bottle. Think Chablis and red and white Burgundy. Cabernet Sauvignon and Bordeaux blends from just about anywhere at but especially Chile, California, Bordeaux. Barolo, Barbaresco.  Buy at least three bottles. Open one within the first 3 months of purchase. One at each year into the future until done. Unless you can’t help yourself.

For C) we’re talking Rioja Gran Reserva with 5 or 6 years of age already, Rieslings of $25+ bottle from Alsace or Germany. California, Australia, Ontario Chardonnays. Buy a few more, maybe 6 or 12. Drink most of them in the first year. Save two or three or six and spread them over the next few years.

Three years down the road you will know a thing or two about your own personal tastes.

Back to number 1. Where to keep them:

Ugly wine rack. Good, good wine.

The singlemost important factor for cellaring wine is consistancy.  Think about your home in summer and your home in winter. Is there someplace where things stay about the same temperature all the time. I keep my wine in an ugly rack (that I love!) in my incredibly cluttered basement.  But, the temperature doesn’t really change through the seasons.  You might have a closet that fits the bill. If you aren’t going to stray away from Category A), it doesn’t matter. Temperature fluctuations and shaking from the nearby train tracks do not ruin wine automatically. They just make the wine’s development less predictable. As long as you are tasting the wine at 6 month to 1 year intervals, you’ll notice in time to drink it all up. Honest, I promise.

Number 3.

I gave some ideas about how much to buy of the various categories of wine that I made up, but there are questions you need to ask yourself. Let’s assume your category B) is made up of mostly bottles around $35 to $50 dollars. How often are you willing to open these? I suppose personality is going to play into the answer here. I’m a bit of a hoarder. I don’t like to share pricier bottles with people who can’t appreciate them. I don’t like to open them alone, either.  If you feel the need to always open the most expensive bottle, no matter what else is there, well, can I suggest therapy? Actually, maybe the wine habit is more affordable.

Let’s presume you want to open the bottles from category B every weekend and that every other weekend you open one, but on the alternate weekend you open three for dinner parties. That’s about 4 bottles every two weeks.

And let’s say you bought 12 bottles of a $35 California Cabernet today and opened a bottle the first week. Bottle number two at 3 months. You hold off for a year for bottle number 3. Then you open a bottle once a year.

At year 5, when you presume the wine will be close enough to its peak that you’re happy to drink it you will have six bottles left. In year 5, you’ll need to have saved 8 bottles per month of your category B wines, to hit your estimate or 96 bottles.  That means a purchase of 16 cases of 12 in year one, or about $560 given our $35 shopping limit. So that’s $560 you spend, knowing that you buy enough that at the 5 years mark, you have left about 50% of the wine to age. During the subsequent years you continue to buy 16 cases of category C wines, all the while buying category A, and to some extent, C for your every day drinking.

All clear? I tried in this post to really crunch the numbers of buying wine, without in any way talking about the wines themselves. The quick answer. But a good way to get started, while you learn about wine. And if you buy a real bummer, you can always pawn it off on someone who doesn’t know any better!

And don’t forget, the goal of all this is that you drink the very last bottle in your cellar the moment just prior to your death – and love every single one of them!

“Quality in wines is much easier to recognize than define”

These sage words open the first chapter in an early important American book on wine appreciation by Maynard Amerine, “Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation”.

To some extent, what I have always liked about wine is that I’m never going to know everything about it. I’m never going to visit every region of the world that’s making wine, I’m never going to taste every wine, every wine style or every vintage – even of the wines I like. When I finally get a handle on what one wine is all about, styles will change, with fashion or because of climate change perhaps, and new people will step in to make it.

Consider the nature of a single bottle of wine. I can speak to the winemaker or the person selling it to me. I can read other people’s reviews. I can taste it today or six months from today or ten years from now, and the experience of this one wine in each of these scenarios is completely different. One bottle of wine. Never contained, never truly completely definable. This has an appealing beauty to me.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about wine and how people learn about it. I had an interesting moment a couple of weeks ago when my husband wandered into the livingroom (where I was studying, another thing I like to mention) with a glass of a wine we had just opened in his hand.

The background to my little story is that in my house we tend to buy $15ish bottles for everyday drinking, by the case. Works well for whites, cava, etc. Reds can be tougher. Recently I purchased a case of a rather rustic European red on the basis of a review by someone whose opinion I value, but, while we liked the wine, well, neither my husband or I loved it. (That’s the first and last time I buy multiple bottles of something I haven’t tasted.) At least not all the time. Goes well with food. Whatever.

Our local piddly LCBO store doesn’t offer much in the way of selection. The Vintages section is a single rack. But they have a lovely $19 Bolgheri that we’ve been picking up just about every weekend knowing we’ll drink it, and not our “house” red that night. It was a glass of said Bolgheri my husband had in his hand.

“Why” my husband asked, “Why is this wine better than the (insert rustic but perfectly correct other red wine name here)? Does quality equal complexity?”

This guy doesn’t study wine. I tell him about successful winemakers, (sometime even introduce him to one), or winemaking operations and his eyes glaze over. Not interested in the slightest in knowing anything about wine in an academic sense. Of course he does know quite a bit, but his experience is really mostly drinking (tasting) wine, and not studying or reading about it.

Yet here he was, having a moment where he realized that although the two wines in question were both red, but from different countries and different grapes, both were perfectly correct in their ways  - yet stylistically different – and he realized he could judge that one of these was superior to the other in a way that had nothing to do with his own personal tastes nor with flaws or shortcomings or their mere absences. And he wanted a way to put that experience in words.

I was rather impressed. He was expressing something that I had been told about before I had ever experienced it. I even felt a little ripped off that it hadn’t happened to me that way.

And I said “Yes”. “Yes, well, sort of”. “Yes, that’s it exactly”. “Yes but not just that”. And probably a bunch of other things.

It can be complexity or balance or some other thing that stands out as wonderful in your mind. When two wines, side by side, are correct, when both are not flawed, both reflect accurately their grape variety, their tradition, their terroir and yet one of them no matter what styles you personally like best, one of them stands out as finer, more complex, better balanced, bigger, more elegant — more something — and that one thing about it stands out better, well, that’s it.

One thing is for sure, I have a lot of wine books. Reading about wine isn’t quite as much fun as drinking it, but there are a ton of informative, and I would argue, entertaining, wine reads out there. That’s right, all that time I spend studying is fun. I’m trying harder to remind myself of that lately.

The unfortunate thing about a lot of wine books is that the information in them can go out of date fast, and there are relatively few sources of first hand data, it would seem, so it’s very easy to find books that don’t introduce any information you couldn’t have found in one of the books you may already have purchased.  Having said that, here are my two cents on the wine books I’m glad I’ve found and that maybe you’d like too.

The holy books:

These are the books you can’t live without, shouldn’t live without. In fact, I insist that you go out and grab a copy of each right away. Ever wonder what I might be getting up to? Now you know.

#1 The World Atlas of Wine by Hugh Johnson

This book narrowly beats out book number two simply for its “pour-over-the-maps-fantasizing-about-trips-through-the-wine-world” factor. Highly detailed maps, in-depth information about regional factors like grape varieties, soil types and wine styles along with snapshots of the best producers from each region. Photographs, labels, and a lovely silk ribbon to hold your place while you memorize the crus and lieu dits of Burgundy… What more could you ask for?

#2 The Oxford Companion to Wine by Jancis Robinson

This is truly a tome.  The Ox is an encyclopedia, so it’s great fun just to flip to any page and discover something new.  Not a whole lot of illustrations, but jam-packed with info. All the info, or as close as any one book I’ve seen comes to. A few complaints: data in the latest edition comes from 2004-2005, pretty old for people accustomed to news at the speed of the internet. (I am ever hopeful there’s a new edition in the works.) There are a lot of individual authors writing the entries, which is great because each is an expert in the topic they cover, but not so great in that there isn’t a consistent style of entry. Some will cover soil types, if that’s your topic du jour, in the first paragraph, some won’t get to that until closer to the end. And like #1 this book is heavy.

Insider info: join Jancis Robinson’s website and receive online access to the Oxford and the maps from the Atlas (but not the text from the Atlas, unfortunately). I can access the Oxford from my phone and office and my shoulders are thrilled not to lug the hardcover around. The hardcover lives on my kitchen table. It’s a pretty good sport about the no-plate peanut butter sandwiches my kids are so fond of.

Honourable Mentions:

Both of these books have been useful to me.

The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia: Tom Stevenson

and

Wine: Andre Domine (beware the map of France however, completely mislabeled)

Getting Started BOOKS:

I haven’t purchased the Wine for Dummy books, but there are a ton of them. Here’s a few you can be smart and still start from the beginning with:

The Wine Bible: Karen MacNeil

In all honesty, I think I purchased this book too late, but while I was doing my initial sommelier studies one of my peers swore by this book. It has organized the world of wine in useful ways, has lots of (small) photos and interesting anecdotes. And while fairly thick (at 910 pages all in) it’s quite condensed and you could read it on the subway without it seeming unwieldy.

Oz Clarke’s Encyclopedia of Grapes: Oz Clarke
possibly now replaced by
Oz Clarke: Grapes & Wines: A Comprehensive Guide to Varieties and Flavours

Update: Yes, Grapes & Wines is the title for a revamped version of what was once called the Encyclopedia.

I loved this book when I first got started in wine. A typical new world girl, I guess, grapes made sense to me. Pinot Noir, the grape skins are thin, that’s why it’s less intensely coloured, it smells like this this and this and it’s grown here here and here.  This was a way of looking at wine that I could really grasp. The major grapes have multiple pages – there’s 12 for Pinot Noir, and then more rare varieties might only have an encyclopedia-style paragraph.  Now I just looked to see if a newer edition is available, since mine is from 2001, and I see Oz has a new book out published 2010 called Oz Clarke: Grapes & Wines: A Comprehensive Guide to Varieties and Flavours. So now I’ve gone and bought 3 books and spent $75. I’m a junkie.  I’ll update this post when I’ve seen the new book to see if it’s as good as the original.

How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine: Jancis Robinson

Here again is a book I didn’t pick up at the right time, but it’s a smart, well-organized intro to wine by one of the best wine writers ever.

The Wine Biography

This the shadiest possible group of wine books. I’ve been given quite a number of terrible books in this category and I only pray their authors will one day feel the shame they have earned for writing such self-involved, inane and uninteresting books. There are some gems though.  I like these:

Baron Philippe: The Very Candid Autobiography of Baron Philippe de Rothschild: Joan Littlewood

and

The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty: Julia Flynn Siler

and

Ernest and Julio: Our Story: Julio Gallo

Ernest and Julio is probably my favourite, their story is fascinating and inspiring. The Baron Philippe book does an incredible job of bringing to life some interesting times in history from angles I haven’t encountered before. European history from the perspective of one powerful and far-flung family. Fun stuff.

I’ve run out of space. Check back next week for my guilty pleasures books and the books to take you deeper into your favourite wine regions.