Today I am going to be taking a break from wine reviews and am going to delve into a subject that might initially come across as a subject of interest to only the very rich. Today I want to talk about the wine cellar. The mere mention of someone having a wine cellar brings up comments such as "must be nice" or "ahh, to be rich". While this can be true just a little bit of research will show that if the purpose for you to have a wine cellar is to simply preserve your wine than anyone can indeed have a cellar. But if the purpose of having a cellar is to display your wine in wonderful and incredible decorated surrounding than yes, it is still indeed mostly for the rich. I think that the question we need to ask ourselves is are you simply looking to preserve your wine or are you looking to display your wine in a beautiful setting. The purpose of this article isn't to say that one is better than the other because it all depends on what you believe the purpose of a wine cellar is. For the purpose of this article we will simply take the view that the whole purpose of a wine cellar is to preserve our wine. If you start off with the basics you can always add to your cellar as your finances allow.
Now, with that being said I think it's important to understand another important item and that is wine is alive. When we think about it the only way to preserve your wine is to keep it alive, that is what we are preserving, anything else leads to the degradation and therefore ruination of the wine. The conditions of the cellar (or room) in which we place our wine determine how healthy our wine remains and for how long. While we all seem to act as if wine is the finished product it really is not. Think about this for a second. How many of you guys have wines that you know are not ready to drink? Well what does that mean? That means that you feel the wine is not the best it can be. What that also means is that the wine is continuing to evolve or change. The wine might change for the better or the worse but the hope of course is that wine will change for the better. At it's core wine is either developing, improving or declining. At it's base wine is the juice from grapes that have live single celled, living organisms called Yeast(s) added to it to impart flavors and to create Alcohol (Ethanol) and Sugars.
There are also bacteria's that are placed into the grape juice to alter the final outcome and into what will hopefully become what we call wine. These events are caused because the Yeast is alive and causing these things to occur. This process of turning Alcohol into sugar is known as "fermentation". Various problems can occur during the fermentation process because the Yeast is effected by many different things which I won't get into because they are not pertinent to this article. There is also the process of using Bacteria to produce something called "Malolactic Fermentation" which still uses live organisms (bacteria). The wine we drink is constantly doing something and doing it because it is indeed alive. Knowing that wine is alive we have to do our best to keep it alive and productive for as long as possible. That is where proper storage or a wine cellar come into play. So we now know a little bit about wine and that we need to keep the living organisms in the wine alive but just how do we do that? Well, here is one reason why people want a wine cellar. There are things that are under our (the wine buyers) control and that we should strive for in order to either maintain our wines or allow them to grow, develop or improve. The room that we choose for all this to happen while the wine is at out our house is a POTENTIAL wine cellar. I say potential because this room must meet certain conditions in order to fulfill the purpose of a properly functioning wine cellar.
There are faults that can exist in the room we choose that must be fixed prior to placing wine in that room. It is best to choose a room that initially has as few of these faults as possible before determining it as your cellar. The less faults the room has the less money we have to spend to eliminate the remaining faults. Without going in depth here are the main faults that can ruin your wines and as such should be eliminated in our potential cellar. Avoidance of improper temperature, the elimination or keeping to a minimum the use of UV lights, The maintaining humidity levels around 60-70% and keeping vibration away from our cellared wines are all important.
I think by now you can see that it would not be too difficult keep your wine away from the above listed faults. You can in reality see that almost any room in your house in my opinion, can be called a potential wine cellar. As long as you can maintain the temperature at the proper levels and avoid the pitfalls mentioned, you have a wine cellar in reality.
One last item. Please don't confuse a fancy room for the only type of wine cellar that can exist. The topic of designing a wine cellar is another topic for another day and should not be confused with the topic of having a wine cellar.
The Desert Wine Guy
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