You’ve just purchased a case of wine for a holiday party, or perhaps a friend has given you a bottle of Barolo from the 2000 vintage and told you to set it aside for a few years before drinking it.

You plan to enjoy the wine at a later date but, for now, you need a place to store it.
Unlike snowbirds and young children who thrive under sunny skies, warm temperatures and fresh air, wines mature at their best when stored in cool, dark and not too damp locations.

Although you can easily keep a few cases of wine in a bedroom closet or a corner of your basement, these areas offer less than ideal conditions for longer-term storage. Wine cellars, on the other hand, keep wines at the correct temperature and humidity for proper aging.

“The magic temperature many cellars are set at is 57?F — about 12?C. That is the place for wine to be for longer-term storage and aging. At that temperature, it can develop at its best rate,” says Dave Steadman, director of sales for The Wine Establishment in Toronto.

The 20-year-old store sells wine accessories, including free-standing wine cellars, and also has a design and construction firm that will build wine cellars in homes.

Steadman says the cost of building a cellar starts at $10,000 if you hire his firm, but do-it-yourselfers can construct a cellar for less. You’ll need to insulate the space, add a vapour barrier and install cooling equipment. Then you need to add shelving. The final cost will depend upon whether you are building a functional cellar or a decorative cellar
to act as a focal point of your home.

Brian Phillips, a vice president at Phillips Hager & North Investment Management Ltd. in Vancouver, had a wine cellar included in the plans when his home was built in 2000.
The 10′ x 5′ space holds about 500 bottles. There is oak panelling on the walls and Italian tiles on the floor. The shelves are made of teak.

“It’s not a tasting cellar; it’s a storage cellar,” says Phillips. The cellar is insulated, and includes a special cooling unit. “It doesn’t exchange air, it simply cools the air within the cellar,” he says, thus maintaining the proper temperature and humidity.

Phillips adds that the cooling unit cost about $400 when he purchased it. Although he’s happy with his cellar, and enjoys inviting guests in to choose a bottle, he has one improvement in mind. He’d like a tasting table outside the cellar, “so you can have an area that is warm enough for people to taste wine.”

That’s one advantage of a free-standing wine cellar, which can be placed in the kitchen or family room. Most of the units look and operate like a standard refrigerator, with the exception that they are at different temperature and humidity levels.

Free-standing cellars also offer portability, says Steadman. “Many customers are not in the last house they are ever going to live in, and they want something that might move along with them.” Other customers simply want to avoid the hassle and cost of installing a full custom cellar, he says.

Pricing for free-standing cellars varies, depending upon size, cabinetry materials and whether or not the cellar requires assembly. Steadman says his most popular small model is the 32-bottle cellar from Cavavin, based in Montreal. It sells for $649.

A 220-bottle model from Vintage Keeper of Mississauga, Ont. sells for $1,595. It is shipped flat and requires assembly. The more deluxe Sobrio brand, from Quebec-based manufacturer Cellier Rosyma, includes a 180-bottle model that sells for $3,750.

Some models include rollout shelving. Others are faced in stainless steel or solid wood to blend in better with existing cabinetry. Steadman adds: “Everything we sell can be considered suitable for longer-term storage.”

Storing opened wines

After you’ve opened your bottle of wine, you can use the principles of storage to preserve your half-consumed bottle. “White wines go back in the fridge. I would do the same with reds, but there is no room in there, because it’s full of white wine,” jokes Billy Munnelly, a professional wine writer and consultant who has been tasting wines for the past 22 years. He says he tastes thousands of wines for each issue of his quarterly newsletter, Billy’s Best Bottles. That means he can have anywhere from six to 60 open bottles of wine on hand.

@page_break@“Wine starts to oxidize, or deteriorate, once it is opened, and refrigerator temperature slows that down,” Munnelly explains. “If you are going to have leftover wine, get it back into the fridge as soon as possible” — with the cork back in the bottle.

Munnelly adds that “screw caps are godsend that way; they’re easy to put back on.”
Wine in the refrigerator can last “sometimes four or five days, especially whites, and sparkling wine in particular, because the carbon dioxide acts a preservative,” he says.
IE