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

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? 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: