How to stock a wine cellar

It’s a big step to build a wine cellar. But then comes the fun part – filling it.

The Specialists

Kevin & Kaaren Palmer

She likes champagne – particularly if it has spent a few years maturing before being opened. He likes shiraz – but only if it’s more than six years old. Which is why, in Kaaren and Kevin Palmer’s under-house cellar in the Adelaide Hills, her hundreds of bottles of gently maturing champagnes and other sparkling wines take up one side of the space and his hundreds of bottles of gently maturing shirazes and other South Australian reds take up the other.

Kaaren, 67, ran an office supplies business for years, and the demands of work meant she had little time for hobbies. “When I sold the business I needed some busyness in my life, so I began to indulge my love of champagne,” she says. “My first taste of proper champagne – a half-bottle of Piper Heidsieck in London in the 1980s – had made a lasting impression. I’d thought, ‘If I can ever afford to drink good wine regularly, this is what I’ll drink’.”

Kaaren now has about 670 bottles in her champagne collection and a deep appreciation of the characters in bottle-aged bubbly. “In my experience, almost every champagne improves with cellaring. Non-vintage champagnes need a year or two to settle down after they arrive in Australia. And vintage champagnes age beautifully for many years.”

Kevin, 68, a retired software developer, didn’t drink wine when he met Kaaren in the mid-’90s, preferring beer. When he tasted a bottle of Henschke Abbotts Prayer (a merlot blend from the Adelaide Hills) it was a “road to Damascus moment” for him, Kaaren says.

“It quickly became a big part of my life,” says Kevin. “For a while I had a good cash income from gambling, and I used to go into my favourite wine shop in Adelaide with thousands of dollars – the manager used to drop everything when he saw me.”

Kevin soon made the classic mistake of enthusiastic new collectors – buying too much of the same wine. “When we dug the cellar out and I realised I suddenly had two or three thousand spaces to fill in the racks, I went a bit silly,” he says. “I would come across a wine I liked and I’d buy four or five dozen of it. But I ended up getting a bit sick of drinking that same wine. So I’m down to buying bottles at a time instead now.”

The Palmers recently sold their Adelaide Hills property to their daughter, which meant they didn’t have to let their beloved cellar go. They keep their wine collection there and visit regularly to extract a few bottles to take back to their new place in the city.

The Early Adopter tOM cRAGO

Tom Crago discovered wine when he was at university. But unlike most other uni students, for whom the alcohol in wine is its primary attraction, Crago started collecting bottles. It helped that he was studying in Adelaide, where he made friends with students from local winemaking families and moved into a share house that had a large cellar.

Soon he was graduating from single bottles of Coonawarra cabernet to cases of Penfolds: “The first was a dozen 1993 Bin 389; I used that month’s rent money.” This helps explain why, although he’s only 40, Crago has amassed a collection of about 3000 bottles – more than 80 per cent of it Australian wine – that he keeps in a purpose-built cellar at his home in Melbourne. It includes a small bar and a table for tastings and dinner parties. “I know it’s a true luxury,” he says. “We built it more than two years ago and to this day I haven’t had the fortitude to calculate the final cost. But it was worth every cent.”

Crago might be the CEO of a video game developer, but when it comes to wine he’s analogue. “I don’t have an inventory system so the whole operation is fairly intuitive,” he says.

“I’m sentimental about wines from people’s birth years and will scour auction catalogues for those vintages,” he says. He also hosts vertical tastings and recently worked through 18 consecutive vintages of Grosset Polish Hill riesling – with friends, of course.

The Cellar Seller Neil Smallman

You’re not just collecting bottles when you collect wine,” says Neil Smallman. “You’re collecting memories. Stories. When you open a special bottle, years later, you remember where you bought it and who you were with. I reckon about a third of the wines I’ve got have a connection with a holiday or a memory of a friend.”

Smallman, 47, keeps his wine in a special spiral staircase cellar installed under the floor of his home in Sydney’s beachside southern suburbs. It’s not just a personal cellar; it’s also a showcase. Since 2009, he has been the Australian agent for this patented brand of in-home cellar, originally developed in France.

Establishing a proper subterranean cellar from scratch is a luxury – the spiral cellars start at $60,000, a third of which can be excavation costs, and go up to $120,000 for a three-metre model. Smallman has worked on cellars costing up to $300,000, including a three-room cellar in Sydney’s northern suburbs where the racking alone cost $90,000.

His own cellar can hold 1900 bottles and his are mostly in the $40 to $80 range, including quite a few top reds from 2009 – the year his son, Sam, was born. “The plan is to open some of those 2009s from time to time, but save the best for Sam’s 21st – to sit down and drink it with him. I’m looking forward to that.”

The Bedroom Converters Kerrie & Tom McMaster

On one of their first dates, Kerrie and Tom McMaster bonded over a bottle of 10-year-old McLaren Vale shiraz – d’Arenberg’s The Dead Arm. “It was delicious,” says Kerrie. “And it cost $99, which we thought was a bargain for a wine of that quality with some years’ cellaring behind it. So from then on, we started hunting around bottle shops and restaurants for older wines. Then we started focusing on wines we could cellar ourselves for another 10 years at least.”

Kerrie, 55, and Tom, 71, both retired from the IT industry, had collected wines long before they met and married. Their combined passion has resulted in a joint haul of well over 1200 bottles. They cellar about half of it off-site in a wine storage facility; the rest of the bottles – those that are ready to open – are kept at home in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, in a bedroom they’ve converted into a cellar. “We’ve blocked out the windows and stopped any heating coming in from the rest of the house,” Tom says. “Because it’s double brick it stays around 14 or 15 degrees all year in here.”

The couple spent $1200 on the racks and pay $1700 a year to cellar half of the collection off-site. They now collect everything from First Growth Bordeaux to blockbuster Australian shirazes and more recent discoveries such as the Primo Estate Joseph Nebbiolo from McLaren Vale, travelling regularly to wine regions here and overseas.

CELLARING 101

STAY COOL: The lower the temperature of the place where you keep your bottles, the more gently and slowly the wine matures. About 13°C is ideal. Up to 20°C is fine, but wine kept at a higher temperature will develop too quickly and end up tasting “cooked”. If necessary, install an air conditioner.

KEEP IT STABLE: A stable temperature is particularly important if wines are bottled under cork. If the temperature fluctuates too much the corks can shrink, bottles can leak and air can get in. Get a maximum/minimum thermometer to keep track of the temperature.

HUMIDITY MATTERS: If the atmosphere is too dry, corks dry out and shrink, bottles leak and air can get in. The ideal humidity is about 75 per cent. If you are using an air conditioner, you may have to humidify the air by keeping a bucket of water in the storage space.

LAY IT DOWN: If cork-sealed bottles are left standing for too long, corks can dry out – and you know the rest. Lying bottles down keeps corks moist. This is not an issue for screwcap wines.

HANDS OFF: Consider keeping special bottles in a trustworthy friend’s cellar or with a cellaring company. Then you won’t be tempted to crack the Grange at the end of a long, boozy night.

Image Captions:

Grape escape: Tom Crago; Kerrie McMaster; Neil Smallman