Keeping it cool

This article was originally published by artinfo.com, an online news and information source for the world of art and culture. artinfo.com is published by Louise Blouin Media.

Good storage is an essential - and often over-looked - part of wine collecting.

The difference between a novice wine collector and a seasoned pro is not necessarily the bottles that they buy. Anyone with deep pockets can waltz into Sotheby’s and pick up a case of Château Latour 1961; the greatest all-time vintages and producers are generally agreed upon, and are easy to discover with a Google search or a call to a wine department specialist. The real test comes when the buyers arrive home, excellent vintages in hand. Where do those bottles go? Into a nice cool basement cellar or in the back of a sock drawer? A temperature-controlled unit or a makeshift rack in an overheated kitchen?

Photo by Jessica Patterson Stoddard. David Spon designed this McLean, Virginia cellar/artinfo.com

Good storage is an essential part of wine connoisseurship, but it’s not the first thing that leaps to mind when a paddle is raised at a wine auction. Most people imagine opening the bottle, sharing it with friends, and savouring the flavour. The one thing people rarely think about when buying fine wine is the cost of storing it.

If you’re drinking the fine wine you’ve just purchased for tomorrow’s dinner, storage doesn’t really matter; it would be hard to harm the wine unless conditions were truly horrible. But most vintages purchased at auction are wines meant to age for years, or they are wines that are older and therefore more delicate. Both require advance planning, especially if the wine is treated as an investment comparable to an artwork, with the potential for resale down the road. One look at the stratospheric rise in wine prices at auction over the past 15 years - even allowing for a recent dip - makes clear that storage is part of the equation. “If you’re buying wine as an investment, you have to be prepared to store it for 10 years,” says the expert.

Whether it’s at home or in a professional facility, a few basic rules apply when it comes to proper wine storage:

Cool > Warm
Humid > Dry
Dark > Light
Stable > Unstable
Constancy > Flux

Temperature is important because heat can age a wine prematurely and result in odd flavours; 55 degrees is the level that most wine experts think is ideal for long-term storage of both whites and reds. Humidity matters because corks can dry out, thereby contracting and letting in air, which can age a wine prematurely. (Too much humidity, however, promotes mould: 60–70 percent is about right). Light and vibrations, from a nearby washing machine, for example, can wreak their own havoc, while constancy in overall conditions (no big temperature or humidity swings) helps a wine age gracefully.

A collector who’s just starting out with a case or two of wine can invest in a small cooling unit - essentially a wine refrigerator that has temperature control. For serious buyers, only a proper cellar will do. Unless you live in a Scottish castle complete with an underground cavern that is always cool and damp, you’ll need a professional to fashion one.

Just as art buyers are not known to stop at one work by their favourite painter, fine wine continues to be endlessly fascinating to a small group of true believers. Those bottles stack up surprisingly fast.

ARTINFO.com offers breaking news, profiles of top and emerging artists, stories about collectors and collecting, gallery round-ups from around the world, the best of student art, market trends and analysis, and detailed coverage of art fairs.

More articles in Spending it