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It’s a Very Good Year . . .to Start Your (Frugal) Wine Cellar
A connoisseur shares her tips for investing in bottled pleasure
By Sharon Sorokin James
he summer I was 17 I spent eight weeks living with a kind, non-English-speaking, decidedly middle class family in the Champagne region of France. My French “father,” Monsieur Moranvillier, had a wine cellar—the basement of the family’s three-story house in Fere-en-Tardenois. The first floor was the shop, where Monsieur and Madame refinished antique furniture for a living. The second floor, a small suite of four rooms, was the home of the grandmother. The Moranvilliers—mother, father, son and daughter (and I, for eight weeks), resided on the third floor (although son Thierry slept in a room in the grandmother’s apartment). And the wine resided in the cellar.
It was a true Frenchman’s wine cellar, dark, cool, devoid of gadgets and gimmicks. Plain wooden racks held some of the wine. The rest remained in the wooden cases in which they had been purchased, stacked on the floor.
Today, nearly 30 years later, my husband and I have created a similar cellar in our own home. The basement of our 200-year-old house cannot be finished—the ceiling is too low. The old stone foundation seeps water when it rains, and the old dirt crawl space would have to be closed off. But it makes a perfect wine cellar—slightly gloomy, cool in the summer, and not much colder in the winter. Best of all, it’s perfectly free. Our wine is organized on inexpensive pine mail-order racks—the kind you put together yourself. What doesn’t fit in the racks (we have about 500 bottles) is stacked in wooden wine cases on the floor. The only concession to technology is a dehumidifier, which we bought to keep the basement drier long before we had the wine cellar. To keep light out, the one window is carefully covered with the wall of a discarded cardboard playhouse that belonged to our daughter.
Our cellar is a
mixture of table wines ($12 and under per bottle), somewhat more upscale
wines ($13 to $25 per bottle), and a smaller sampling of wines in the $25
to $40 per bottle range. We have just a handful of wines that cost more
than $40 per We’ve found that investing in wine doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. If you pick wisely, your wines will increase in value as they mature in your cellar. But the non-monetary returns of this hobby are far greater. As you start your own “frugal cellar,” just be sure to do what we did: Read, drink, and be creative. Read up before you drink up. Don’t be intimidated by the lingo of wine writers. Read how they describe wines. Read about different types of grapes (even though it may take you years to remember the difference between a Merlot grape and a Syrah grape). Read about different wine regions. Read reviews and ratings of wines. Then drink. Better yet, drink while you read. Try to describe what you taste, in your own words. Let the wine linger in your mouth and swallow it slowly. Collecting reds (and whites) without going ‘in the red.’ Best yet, be creative. We have one friend, a doctor in Mobile, Alabama, who started an incredible wine collection many years ago by buying the wine cellar of a local restaurant that was going out of business. He promptly resold most of it, keeping only the best bottles. The proceeds from the sale were enough to cover the cost of purchasing the wine. Over the years, he has bought and sold wine, often at a profit. Now some 25 years later, he has a cellar that includes a Bordeaux from virtually every outstanding vintage in the last 50 years. At the Millennium New Year, he treated us, along with other friends, to a vertical tasting of 20th-century Bordeaux. It was staggering. The mother of another friend of ours prides herself on her wine collection. She has amassed it on a tight and disciplined budget. She and her husband set a limit of $10 per bottle. (This was some years ago. You might have to stretch it to $12 or $15 today.) Then she and her husband sought out every terrific bottle of wine in their budget. They never strayed from the budget. Unexpected dividends. For them and others involved in collecting wines, a large part of the fun is chasing down the hidden gems. And there are always unexpected pleasures to be found along the way. Our last trip to France was to Languedoc. It was a great choice—virtually untouristed, with small vineyards, some of whose owners were actually friendly. My husband researched the area before we left, selecting vineyards he wanted to visit. Most were within an hour’s drive from our rented house in the tiny (population: 500) village of Nizas. Priorie St. Jean de Bebian was only about 10 minutes from our house. We stopped by on a lovely afternoon and since my French is better than my husband’s or our traveling companions, I was the one who approached the disheveled man in the mud-splattered jeans near the barn. He chatted with me amiably in French and took me up to the main building, a wing of an old priory, to schedule an appointment to visit. Turns out, he was the owner. When we returned two days later, the four of us toured the vineyard with just one other couple, and then tasted wine in the stone tasting room. Monsieur Le Brune told us all about how he bought the vineyard (he had been a professor in another life, and then the owner of a very successful French wine magazine), and described how he had made each of the wines we tasted. After the other couple left, we lingered. Knowing our interest in the buildings (my husband is an architect), Monsieur Le Brune offered us a tour of his home. It was a delightful afternoon, culminating with Monsieur Le Brune signing one of the bottles of wine we bought and writing on it “Drink me in 2005.” It is now aging nicely in our cellar. None of the wine we purchased from him was expensive. Some of it is quite good; some of it may prove unremarkable as wine goes. But the experience will be remembered forever. And that memory is a dividend that would never have accrued if we’d taken the money we’ve spent on Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Riesling over the years and put it in the stock market. It’s Easy to Be an Oenophile 1. Start your cellar with one case of wine. Divide it evenly between reds and whites, and between wines that can be drunk now and wines that must age. Include one or two bottles of dessert wine.
2. Decide upon a budget, and stick to it. Enjoy the limitations—they will add a challenge and provide you with a framework. 3. Protect your investment. Set aside a space for storage. Remember, if your wine is kept in a warmer place (above 70 degrees), it will age more quickly. This is not necessarily bad; you just need to keep track of when it would ordinarily be drinkable, and then accelerate the schedule based on the storage conditions. 4. Try to keep your wine at an even temperature, in a range of 58 to 68 degrees. 5. To get the maximum enjoyment out of your investment, read about your wine. Find out when it should be drunk (most wines have a window of several years for decent drinking) and drink it then—or earlier if you are storing it at a warmer temperature. 6. Keep a list of your wines and jot down a few notes on their taste, and your reactions, when you drink them. This will keep you from making the same mistake twice. 7. For bargains, focus on up-and-coming wine regions, such as Chile, Languedoc in France, Spain, Long Island in New York, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Often wines from these regions will be less expensive. Also try some Alsatian whites. They are terrific and often are less expensive than other high-end French whites. 8. Invest a few dollars in a plastic cork that has a hand-operated suction device. It pumps all the air out of the bottle, so that if you only drink part of the bottle, you can easily save the wine for days. The lack of air keeps the wine from deteriorating. 9. Be bold. Experiment. 10. Most of all, salud, cheers, prosit, enjoy! ______________________________________ Real estate lawyer Sharon Sorokin James is a restaurant reviewer and member of MAKING BREAD’s Editorial Advisory Board. |
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