Basic rules in keeping the wine ‘cellar’

Press, 20 April 1979, Page 17

Basic rules in keeping the wine ‘cellar’

(By

MAURICE HUNTER)

The guests are almost on the doorstep, the meal is prepared as far as possible and the table is set

with the best silver. As you prepare to sink back and relax for a few moments until the first ring of the door bell brings you alive again, you have an uncomfortable feeling that something is missing. Suddenly, consternation. Simultaneously you face each other and exclaim:

“The wine.” Each of you had thought the other was attending to this small detail.

After about 30 seconds of recriminations you leap into'the car and head for the nearest bottle store, the only place open at this hour. The wine you want is not stocked and you return, just ahead of the first arrivals, with a substitute for which you do not particularly care but which will just have to do. You are conscious all evening that the meal would have been so much more enjoyable if only you had been better prepared. Something like this has happened to all of us at some stage and there is, of course, only one solution. You should have a wine cellar. Now, don’t recoil in horror. You will not have

to build on an extra room, you will not have to call in earthmoving machinery to excavate under the house, and it will not cast a fortune. I like to see the correct word being used in the right place, but when I find that the Oxford Dictionary definition of a cellar is “an underground room for the storage of wine, coal etc.,” I cannot help thinking that perhaps a little up-dating is indicated.

Talk of a cellar conjures

up a mental impression of a dark, dungeon-like place, full of musty air, dust, cobwebs, and walls dripping with moisture, conditions to which wine is particularly susceptible and which could not be worse for wine storage. When used in connection with wine, the word “cellar” has a much wider application than when the lord of the

manor, inundated with guests after the hunt, was liable to instruct Jeeves to“slip down to the cellar and bring up half a dozen of the Margaux ’28.” Only oil barons can afford to maintain a baronial hall complete with cellar in these hard times so, for our purpose, a cellar is any place where it is convenient and suitable to stare our modest stocks. There’-are a few essential criteria. It must be a place where the air may circulate, but where there is no direct draught. It must be a place where the temperature is reasonably constant, that is, within about five degrees either way of 13 degree;, C. The actual level is not critical as long as there are no violent fluctuations. It must be shaded from direct light. And care should be taken to ensure that it is not close to hot water pipes or a hot water cylinder. For our purpose, this means that a good place in an average home is in a cupboard, preferably not in the kitchen, under a stair case? a spare corner of an inside wall or in a corner of a built-in gar-* age.

Having decided where your cellar is to be, the next decision concerns the type of storage. This will be mainly horizontal as. whether storing for

current use or for bottle ageing, all table wines should be kept on their sides. The wine is thus kept in contact with the cork and a moist cork will not shrink and allow the excess air to spoil the contents.

Fortified wines — ports, sherries, muscatels — are not subject to air spoilage and may be stored upright. As a guide, any wine which has the cork right inside the neck of the bottle, requiring a corkscrew to extract it, must be stored horizontally. Any with a flanged cork may be stored upright. And, since plastic does not shrink, sparkling wines with plastic stoppers may also be stored upright. The type of shelving or racking you choose is limited only by your own imagination. Commercial manufacturers of wine racks offer them in all sorts of materials such as wood, plastic, wrought iron and polystyrene, and in all sorts of shapes and designs, from the simple to the intricate.

Do-it-yourselfers have an even wider choice, particularly if the objective is simply to provide storage which will not be seen

and appearance does not matter. By far the cheapest and easiest way is to ask your supplier for

some empty 12-bottle cartons. Place them on their sides and the cardboard dividers give you instant storage. When plastic milk bottle crates were being introduced one of my friends bought a number of wire crates for 10 cents each and used them in the same way. They look

rough, but they do the job.

My own cellar is in the wardrobe of a spare bedroom. It contains a series of plain wooden shelves to each of which is tacked an 8 cm wide strip of corrugated fibreglass, the grooves of which provide a safe resting place for the bottles. The shelves

are spaced just far enough apart to take a double row and, on a length of 120 cm, I can store 27 bottles.

These are stacked with the bases facing me and, on each base, is a self adhesive label bearing a brief description of the wine. I can thus select the wine 1 want and remove it with the least disturbance

to the others. This is important as sleeping wines do not take kindly to being shaken about. All the upright bottles occupy the top shelf.

But this is only my type of carpentry — the bush variety. The handyman who likes to do a natty job, which is an ornament as well as being practical, has a wider choice. For instance, with a few strips of wood, some doweling and some brass screws, he can make a very attractive rack to hold up to about 24 bottles.

It is best to use a hard wood such as mahogany as the weight could split a soft wood. Suitably stained to match other furniture, if is a nice addition to a shelf or cocktail cabinet.age

If a section of wall is available a simple and effective fixture may be made in either square or

rectangular shape in which the divisions are set on the diagonal to produce diamond shaped bins — a space saving method for storing quite a quantity of your favourite liquid.

A more elaborate method is to set into a wall a number of field drains of slightly larger diameter than an average bottle.

Although probably the most expensive, the arrangement has the advantage of providing separate accommodation for each bottle, it affords a certain amount of protection against sharp changes of temperature and it allows any bottle to be removed without disturbing others, It also creates a feature wall which is bound to be

a talking point among your friends. My recommendation is to have a smallish rack for the display of wines for drinking and a larger fixture for long term stor- .