Cellaring Wine
Let’s start with a basic idea: what is a wine cellar? It’s a room designed to store wine over a very long period. That’s all the room does. You shove a …
Let’s start with a basic idea: what is a wine cellar? It’s a room designed to store wine over a very long period. That’s all the room does. You shove a …
Making those choices would be a challenge for even a well-seasoned wine drinker. So I turned to several Philadelphia wine experts for advice – plus specifics on how they would spend that $500 – and discovered a wide range of strategies, styles, and considerations for tackling such a happy conundrum.
The first question each one asked, though, was probably the least sexy: What is the storage situation?
“If wines are not stored in a reasonably cool, dark environment, they’re not going to hold very well,” says Keith Wallace, founder of the Wine School of Philadelphia. “Even two years out, bottles can be compromised.”
Dealing with wine fridges or a genuine basement wine cellar is a project of its own that can easily devour hundreds of dollars. But it’s a necessary evil if you plan to lay an expensive bottle down for a decade or two.
International Wine Cellar, notoriously the most difficult of the major wine-review publications, called this bottling “fully mature and delicious.” To that, we would also add “guilt-inducingly affordable” and “dangerously drinkable.”
Props to the British government: its wine cellar reportedly holds bottles valued more than $1.3M from the likes of Chateaux Lafite, Margaux, and Mouton Rothschild. The wines are apparently at the …
These days all the new wine gadgets I hear about seem to have something to do with using magnets or cosmic rays or something to make cheap wine taste better or …