You love fine wine, but you don’t love drinking 2-year old reds. So you want to start collecting some of the best wines until they mellow enough to enjoy. What you don’t have is an underground cellar. And you don’t have access to a double brick garage that you don’t need for your car. You don’t even have a house – you live in a second-floor apartment. Global warming isn’t helping either.

The obvious next step is to hire a vault at Kennards or Cellarit or the Wine Ark, where the temperature and humidity are perfect, and the only lights are LEDs.Perfect. Just one problem: 2 little boys have muscled into your lives, and they’re ripping big chunks out of your budget. So is your mortgage, which has grown even faster than the kids. So the perfect storage option may have to wait for a time.

You’ve read what the experts say: a constant temperature is essential, ideally between 14 – 18 degrees. That’s nonsense as you’ll find out. Yes, there are ways to store wine in your apartment, without serious risk of spoilage. Read on.

Wine Cabinets

These combine high cost of storage with reliance on – and the cost of – electricity to maintain a constant temperature. The 170 bottle Vintec cabinet pictured costs about $4000, so the cost per bottle is about $24 plus electricity. This gives you temperature-controlled storage for 14 dozen bottles of wine. By the time you add 1 or 2 more of these, cost will be an issue, along with space. And if you live in an area that suffers black-outs in summer, this is not a no-risk option.

The advice that wine needs to be stored at a constant temperature all year round turns out to be nonsense, as I’ve outlined in this post: Cellaring Wine in a Hot Climate – Over 4 Decades of Hard-Won Wisdom. Far more important is a buffer against sudden changes in temperature such as a cold southerly blasting through the house after a hot spell. The most important thing is making sure that the temperature changes are gradual from day to day and season to season.

That means looking for suitable storage places. The obvious ones to avoid are kitchens and laundries with appliances that put out heat. When I lived in a second floor apartment in Mosman, I used a huge cupboard in the hallway in the centre of the place for wine storage. More wine went under the beds in the second bedroom. I kept the wine in cardboard boxes, and stored almost 50 dozen that way.

Ticking the Right Boxes

In an apartment it makes sense to use the coolest room. You can use cheap foam or other insulation or a heavy blind to cover any windows, and you can store your wine in solid boxes that provide surprisingly effective insulation. With most wines now bottled under screwcaps, humidity is no longer a concern for wine storage but can still affect your labels, so bear that in mind. Screwcaps also mean that you no longer need to store bottles lying on their sides, which gives you more storage options.

In the last few years, wine companies have taken to shipping wine in boxes that hold 6 bottles. As a result, most wineries and wine merchants now ship 6-pack boxes, and the empty ones are stacked up near the checkouts at retailers like Dan M’s and 1st Choice. There are crappy boxes and there are luxury boxes, so you need to be picky with the ones you use. Here are 3 of the best:

The top prize goes to the Casella box on the left / below. The thick cardboard is clearly designed for serious insulation during shipping. The downside is that this makes the box much bigger than others, so it will take up more storage space.

Second prize goes to the Grant Burge box (middle), a luxurious red package designed for their upmarket wines. This is a strong box made of quality cardboard, and it’s a standard size except for the length designed for those extra tall bottles. That means it also fits Riesling bottles as you can see. Very nice.

The third box is the standard 6-pack box with those soft cardboard inserts for bottles. They’re quite effective too, but vary in quality so you need to be picky. Go for the sturdy, thick ones. The boxes also come in different sizes, of course.

Wine Vaults

For a lock-up that you manage yourself at Kennards, the cost is $127 a month for a 25 case Mini Cellar. And it’s just under $400 a month for a 100 case ‘Jumbo Cellar’. That’s $1500 and $4800 per annum respectively, which is a big chunk out of your wine budget; and the facility is nowhere near as convenient as having the wine you want at hand.

Managed facilities, where the warehouse people look after your wine, catalogue it and accept deliveries from your wine merchant are much dearer again but still don’t address the tyranny of distance. Perhaps the best option is to hire a small vault for your most precious wines, and keep the rest at home.

Final thoughts

For most of us, storing wine involves compromises but I trust that this piece has added some practical footnotes to the rules for cellaring wine, which experts tend to hand down like God did the ten commandments. Clearly, if you live in Brisbane or Perth and further north, you may need more than well-insulated cardboard boxes. In really hot areas, you might want to use a combination of arrangements ranging from air-conditioning to storing some of your wine at a friend’s house or a temperature-controlled lock-up.

Whatever combination you choose, do the numbers carefully. If you’re collecting Grange, the storage cost per bottle is insignificant. If you’re collecting $20 wines, it’s a very different value proposition.

Kim

The Short Story

I love wine. Not just drinking it with good food, but reading and writing about it, sharing it with friends. I’ve loved good wine for decades, and the challenge of finding wines that stand out from the ordinary. Wines that we ordinary mortals can afford. And meeting the extraordinary people who make them.

It’s over fifty years ago that I discovered the joys wine can bring into your life. I’ve loved good food since I was 6 years old. For my birthday I’d ask for cheese and salami. No kidding. My parents shook their heads and mumbled words about a budding gourmet.

When I reached drinking age, I contracted hepatitis A and alcohol was off the menu for several years. My father used to buy some wine for Christmas, cheap and not very cheerful German wine like Zeller Schwarze Katz, one rung below Liebfraumilch. We weren’t exactlyI remember clearly when I discovered the joys of wine: I was at a trade show in Canberra, held in the old Hotel Canberra. On the last day I treated myself to lunch in the sun-flooded dining room on a cold winter’s day. I ordered a chicken dish and asked the waiter if there was a half bottle of wine that would go with the chicken.

He suggested an Orlando Riesling that was a revelation, and taught me a lesson in matching wine and food.

The sixties had seen big changes in the wine business down under. The popularity of Sherry waned, and so did that of cheap bubblies like Barossa Pearl and Mardi Gras. Table wine began to grace lunch and dinner tables, and soon outstripped supply. Chateaux Cardboard made it easy, affordable and ubiquitous.

A bottle of Grange cost $2.40, same as St Henri. Mildara’s Coonawarra Cabernet was up there with those two, and the most expensive wine was Seppelt’s Great Western Champagne. Yes, this was years before the Europeans objected to us using their place names.

The Big Bang

The 1960s saw new vineyards planted at breakneck speeds, from the Hunter to the Barossa. New areas were opened up for grape vines: The Upper Hunter, Margaret River, the Great Southern, the Limestone coast, then called Padthaway or Keppoch, and even Tasmania which was said to be too cold. Old areas that had ceased making wine long ago, were reborn: Mudgee, the Yarra Valley, Geelong, Bendigo

New stars were born and shone brightly – Vasse Felix and Cullens, Rothbury and Rosemount, Mount Mary and Seville Estate, Brand’s Laira and Piper’s Brook Grape growers in South Australia grew into wineries. The Berry co-operative grew into the wine giant of the Riverina.

New varieties were planted, such as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. We saw the promise of Aussie Burgundies at a fraction of the cost. New Zealand saw the same drastic changes. Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough became the new wave that ended up conquering the world.

There were many setbacks, of course, once the dust had settled. Many new ventures failed to deliver on starry-eyed expectations, others had simply grown too fast. Big Business joined the heady gold rush and bought wineries, many with hallowed names and histories going back well over a century.

Barbarians at the Gate

The corporate raiders, as they became known, swept across the wine landscape like the Huns had swept across Europe centuries before. They didn’t understand that wine was different from iron ore or pork bellies. Their victims soon filled up the graveyards like so many old cars that had rusted into the ground they stood on.

Lindemans, Orlando, Mildara, Minchinbury, Saltram, Seaview and Stanley Leasingham are a few that come to mind.

The red wine glut hit the industry hard in the eighties. The writing had been on the wall for years but no one had taken notice. Shiraz muffins didn’t soak up the excess, so governments paid wineries to pull out vines.

What did they do? Being farmers first and foremost, most pulled out the oldest, least productive wines. The ones that produced the exceptional fruit.

During the nineties, I focused on caring for my wife Benita who suffered from a terminal illness, and wine took a back seat. When I came back to it in the new millennium, that world had changed. Prices for the wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy were reaching for the stratosphere, driven up by American brain surgeons and newly minted Chinese billionaires.

Down under, wineries were creating prestige labels and demanding small fortunes for them. They grew the export market with vins ordinaires from the bottom end of their production, and sold them as ‘sunshine in a bottle.’ The export market boomed but our wineries lost money on every bottle they sold. 

In 2001, at the height of the export boom, Southcorp paid Bob Oatley the princely sum of $1.5 billion for Rosemount Estates and became the world’s largest premium brand winemaker. A couple of years later, BRL Hardy merged with Constellation Brands to create the world’s largest international wine business.

The new world was ruled by faceless people in shiny suits who knew nothing about wine and had no respect for tradition. Constellation Wines Australia sold the original .8 acre vineyard planted to Cabernet Sauvignon by John Reynell in 1838 to Pioneer Homes, which built 41 high-density homes on it. All they kept was the shingle.

New World

I didn’t like the new world of wine, and the new generation of pretentious punters and wine writers that came with it. Suddenly sommeliers strutted like peacocks at precious new restaurants that charged small fortunes for smaller servings. They were needed, I soon realized, because the diners at these places knew nothing about wine or food. They just wanted to impress the people they were with.

I opted out of the whole scene, except for dinners with the front bench as we called the motley lot of true wine lovers that had gathered at Peter Bourne’s Wine Emporium since the late 1970s. Peter decided to move to Orange but the dinners continued at a nw venue at Pyrmont.

I didn’t like many of the wines either, not just because their prices were inflated but because their alcohol levels had gone through the roof with them. Grange and St Henri were 12.5 to 13% when I made their acquaintance; now they were 14.5. Others went to 15 and more. The biggest, ripest, plushest reds won all the trophies in those days, with the judges falling for their ever-so-obvious charms.

The same story played out in France, where more and more winemakers in Bordeaux picked their grapes later and cranked up the alcohols because Robert Parker loved big, ripe, plush reds.

My new partner Tracey lived in Cremorne, on Sydney’s lower north shore, with a Vintage Cellars an easy walk away, and we tried some of their $7 blackboard specials. I kept looking for affordable bargains, and became pretty good at finding them. I still had a lot of wines from the good old days left in my cellar, which were ready to drink, and we’d share a couple of those with friends most weekends.

Lift-Off

One day over a long lunch with good wine friends, one of them was so impressed with my latest find that he floated the idea of setting up Best Wines Under $20. I had no trouble seeing a ready market of wine lovers who’d be happy to pay for good advice that raised their drinking pleasure while reducing its cost.

I ended up with a couple of thousand rusted on subscribers who keep telling me that I’m the only wine scribe they trust, which is gratifying. The downside is that I buy many of the wines I taste, because many wineries want nothing to do with a wine site that’s focused on bargains under $20.

I’ve lost track of the number of winemakers I meet who tell me they don’t make wines that cost less than $20, and I have to tell them how wrong they are and remind them of their lower-level labels. Some seem stunned and then dart off to talk to someone else, while the smarter ones sign up to my weekly mailer so they can stay in touch with the real world they lost touch with.

Other wineries, distributors and merchants have been happy to support what we’re doing. Yalumba is one winery I have enormous admiration for. Intelligent, forward-looking, pioneering. Kumeu River is another, run by the Brajkovich family. Neither one has nothing to gain from talking to me but always responds with enthusiasm. Jim Barry, Rosily, Richard Hamilton / Leconfield and the Usual Suspects Collective (formerly Hesketh) are others.

A few independent wine merchants have survived and thrived in a world dominated by Woolworths, Coles and ALDI. Kemenys in Sydney continues to support us, despite reviews that CEO David Reberger has described as ‘brutal’.

Winedirect in Adelaide is an outfit I admire just as much. They continue to send us samples despite the harsh words I’ve written about some of them. MyCellars in Adelaide has also been really supportive, offering free freight to our subscribers.

All Things Nice, Never Mind the Price

Harsh words are rarely spoken in this industry; more often whispered. All the wine scribes are ever so polite, at least in print. You don’t bite the hands that feed you. The exception was Philip White who had a huge scare with cancer a few years ago, and is hanging in there against the odds, but no longer smithing words for his Drinkster site. I miss his words and his wit.

I think it was Len Evans who said good wine writers should make their readers want to rush out and buy the wine they’re reviewing. Len lived in some vinous cloud cuckoo land, mostly writing about wines that cost hundreds or thousands, or wines that were simply not procurable. Halliday follows his advice to the letter.

I never saw my job that way – I thought it was to tell subscribers what wines not to waste their money on: bottles decorated with medals and poetic descriptions on back labels, tricked up wines with artificial charms, or ‘industrial autoplonk’ as Philip White describes it. The big guys have become really good at making deceptive wines of this style.

Most wine writers describe the wines they review in great detail, and what they come up with often has me rubbing my eyes, twitching my nose and shaking my head. They must resort to the aroma wheel to find the fancy words they use, and who is going to argue with them? The punter who shells out hard-earned dollars for the wine, and then wonders why he can’t see what the reviewer raved about.

At a Kemenys lunch at the Quay Restaurant some years ago, the MC supplied by Penfolds talked us through the brackets of wine in front of us, describing the various aromas and flavours in great detail.

A gentleman at my table frowned as he said he couldn’t see many of the things the reviewers saw in these wines, from the blueberries and violets to the charcuterie and chocolate … He asked me if I did (my name tag said I was a wine scribe). When I confided that I often had the same problem, a relieved smile came over his face.

No Bull

I’ve tried hard to keep Best Wines Under $20 a bullshit-free zone. My friend Jeffrey put it so well when he sent me this capsule: ‘Kim, the world wine industry is soooooo full of bull-shit and false direction that I sometimes think I need out, to sell off my wines and go vegetarian just to escape, to regain perspective.’

‘Honestly, I’m sick and tired of the bull-shit journalists, the pretension, the hustling, the egos, the point scoring, the investment portfolios. Can you tell me what I can do to regain my lost respect, my lost interest, even my sanity? I want imperfection. A little bret. A wine that says ‘up yours’ Mr journalist … Mr connoisseur … just drink me with a piece of good cheese.’

Andrew Caillard’s piece in Gourmey Traveller years ago struck a chord as well. He talks about ‘a language that is developing to satisfy the expectations of luxury wine buyers and wine aficionados. We live in an age of beautifully packaged wines with superbly exaggerated stories and prices.’

Luxury goods. Pretentious restaurants with eye-watering prices. Reviewers talking about wines as if they were fashioned by angels, writing wine poetry instead of wine reviews.

The luxury goods market runs on a different set of rules, which are all to do with building a formidable brand on a pedestal of exclusivity. On the consumer side, it’s not what we say about luxury goods – it’ what they say about us.

The most prestigious brands let others know that you’re a person of ample means and impeccable taste. Chanel, Rolex, Chateau Lafite, Penfolds Grange … Even people who know little about wine know that Grange is a special red with a hefty price tag, except for the ex-premier of NSW.

Still Crazy after all these Years

We’ve kept our feet on the ground, even while we’ve raised the price ceiling to include special wines under $50, like the wonderful Wynns black label Cabernets. Yet I still get excited when I find great wines around $20.

This where ‘the fundamental things apply …’ to quote from that song in the movie Casablanca. Stunning, seductive, succulent, beguiling, delightful, luscious, attractive, morish, exciting, charming, appealing, easy on the gums, easy on the pocket.

Of course there were times when my enthusiasm faded, but then a wine would come along and smack me in the face in the nicest way.

Kemenys’ Hidden Labels often do that. The Coonawarra Cabernet 2020 is a classic Coonawarra red with a big future. You’d be more than happy to pay twice the asking price of $17 if you don’t mind the plain wrapper.

If your budget is more elastic, recent Wynns Cabernets are as good as any I can remember. The 2018, 2019 and 2021 are all still out there for a bit over $30, Peter Pan reds that are easy to admire in their youth, and slow to grow up.

Some of the stunning 2022 Rieslings from the Clare Valley put big smiles on my face, as did the Village Chardonnays from Kumeu River across the Tasman, the great reds from the 2021 vintage in South Australia, from the Barossa to Coonawarra …

I haven’t been buying a lot of reds these last few years, since I eat far more seafood than red meat these days. Most samples of reds I see are barely 2 years old, and tasting them is not an experience I look forward to.

I’ve written about the Wolf Blass reds from the late sixties – they were soft, smooth and seductive in their youth, and good drinking for many years beyond that. When I tasted the current reds from Larry Cherubino’s Robert Oatley Signature range, I wondered if Larry had worked out Wolfie’s secrets.

The Shiraz and the GSM are seductive, enjoyable already, and don’t hit your hip pocket too hard at $18. They’re great moral boosters for our claim that you don’t to spend big money to find terrific wines, and just the ticket for those of you who don’t have a decent wine cellar.

From Another Planet

Out of the Blue a box of samples arrived on our doorstep from Picardy, a winery at Pemberton in the Great Southern of W.A. The winery is the work of Bill and Sandra Pannell who set up Moss Wood in Margaret River in the sixties.

They sold Moss Wood and planted a vineyard at Pemberton in the nineties, in a ‘holy grail’ style quest to make Pinots Noir down under that are up there with great Burgundies. The wines are not exactly in our sweet spot for bargains, but you can’t argue with the quality or value.

Now I’ve been pretty blunt about Pinots made down under, conceding some years ago that even a sleuth of my experience and cunning could not find a decent Pinot under $25, let alone good one. Even spending $50 and more rarely produced the goods. Grenache became my go-to choice for foods that needed a red with a light touch. And it still is.

The Pinots from Picardy showed me that we can make truly great Pinots. First you have to find the right place, and Margaret River clearly isn’t that. Every other variety thrives there, but not Pinot Noir. That’s why the Pannells started all over again at Pemberton, and built a small chateau there in the French style.

From there it’s all about clonal selection, an ongoing process of importing and planting clones to find out which perform the best in the vineyard’s soil and climate (after some years have passed). I suspect that this has taken tremendous dedication and patience from Bill and Sandra and their team.

I’m saving up for the Picardy Pinot Noir 2022, which will be released soon, because it’s knockout. You can read Ray Jordan’s short summary of this ambitious venture on the website https://www.picardy.com.au/. And here’s all you need to know about clones, from Decanter.

Just as the samples had come out of the blue, so did the short enail from Bill Pannell:

‘Dear Kim,
I would like to congratulate you on your recent appraisals of our wines, which I believe were eminently and objectively fair and thoroughly professional.’

Kindest regards,
Bill Pannell

Yes I love wine because it never fails to surprise you, or lift you when you’re down, and excite you when you need fresh enthusiasm.

Picardy – a tiny slice of France at Pemberton