Cellaring Wine in a Hot Climate - Over 4 Decades of Hard-Won Wisdom

Confessions of a Peripatetic Wine Tragic

With summer just around the corner, we’re taking a deep dive into cellaring wine, using my own experience of over 4 decades. We’ve finally created the perfect cellar on a shoestring in our new home. Along the way, we blow up a number of myths dished out by the experts on the rules of wine storage.

‘If you’re going to cellar, you need to find a way to keep your wine below 17 degrees Celsius, but ideally between 12 and 15 degrees. If you go above this range, factor in that your wines will develop at a faster rate and are unlikely to cellar long-term.’

That’s the advice from Campbell Mattinson in James Halliday’s Wine Companion. The advice from other experts is a little less prescriptive but they all agree that a constant temperature of around 15 degrees is ideal. That’s absolute rubbish, as I’ve proved over 4 decades of maturing wines in less than ideal conditions. I have 30 year-old reds in perfect condition that prove my point.

For various reasons, the last two decades of my life have been unsettled. I’ve lived in 7 different homes, some owned, some rented. The worst of these for wine storage was a second-story flat in Balmoral. I lived in that spectacular part of the world for almost a decade, with my precious wines tucked into a large hallway cupboard, and taking up all the space under 2 beds in the spare room.

My first cellar in our Avalon house almost met the ideal temperature specs; it was mostly underground, south-facing, below the main bathroom under a concrete ceiling. Alas, access was through a manhole in the wall, and inside it was so squeezy that a jockey would’ve struggled.

The reason was a huge rock that occupied most of the space. I chipped away at it for a while, but it felt as futile as digging an escape tunnel out of Stalag 13 on my own.

The other option was to dig some dirt out from around the rock. That proved a little more productive, and eventually I’d dug out enough dirt to make room for some banana boxes stacked on their sides – remember those rough and heavy hardwood things? They held about 15 bottles and cost nothing at the fruit shop.

Luxury

The next Avalon house sat on a concrete pad, and had a brick garage. I covered the windows and doors with foam, and bought a small eggnishner. It was a leap into wine hyperspace – I had plenty of room I could walk around in without bumping my head, and a straight concrete floor.

Things went downhill from here. The next house at Bilgola had a huge underground area built into the hill, facing south, which was so wide open that the southerlies went straight through it. I was buying most of my wines from wineries at the time, and used the wooden and cardboard boxes they came in to provide a buffer against the weather.

To my surprise it worked for the 5 summers I was there – up on a hill enjoying cool breezes. Then came an old block of flats at Cremorne Point, which had a south-facing garage of solid double brick construction. That worked when the weather was dry, but water leaked in after heavy rain.

Tough Love

Next was the second-floor flat at Balmoral, one street away from the promenade. It was an old block of 4 flats, solid double brick, small windows, well insulated from the elements. This would really test my theory that it was more important to protect wine from sudden changes in temperature than keeping it at a constant 17 degrees, but all my wine was on the line here.

Of course I thought about storing my wines at Kennards or the Wine Ark, but their facilities were expensive and a long way from home, and I preferred to spend the money on more wine. I have to admit to a few sleepless nights during hot summers at Balmoral, when the inside thermometer nudged 25 degrees.

One concession I made was upgrading my wine boxes to industrial strength, so I kept hunting for the right kinds of boxes in the DM stores on the lower North Shore. However, the best boxes by far came from Calabria Wines in Griffith, and I used them for my most precious wines. More here including pictures.

The Black Diamond

Some 5 years ago Tracey’s wonderful mum went into aged care in Berry, south of Sydney, after enjoying a full and active life.. It was a sad time but at long last, Tracey said YES to a question I had asked her almost 17 years before. We were married on a cloudless summer’s day at the Silos winery near Berry, with our mum watching and crying with joy.

We decided to rent in Thirroul, a beachy suburb of the Illawarra, the halfway point between Berry for visiting mum and Sydney where my kids lived. If we liked Thirroul, we planned to buy there.

It was the first time we’d lived in the same house; until then we were just spending weekends together. That arrangement had worked like a treat for nearly two decades, and we both wondered if living together full-time might kill the magic. It didn’t (but it had its moments).

Most of the wine went under the stairs in the house we moved into, the rest into the laundry. It was a modern house with air-conditioning, which we only used during heat waves.

After a while, we found that Thirroul didn’t really grab us. So, after our mum left this world (fortunately before the world was turned upside down by a virus), we decided to move to further south. We’ve always loved the South Coast, especially Kangaroo Valley, where our mum used to live. Yet, we really love the water and the beach. We decided to rent in Kiama to get to know the place before we bought.

No Country for Tall Men

The house near the top of Barney Street had a perfect little cellar, built into a steep hill, double brick, concrete ceiling and a dry dirt floor. The only challenge was a ceiling height of 5 foot, which wasn’t a good match for my 6 foot 4 frame. Getting the wine boxes in there was a backbreaking effort, on par with my first cellar in Avalon, the one with the big rock in the middle. Only this time I was 40 years older.

Our wines were getting older too, and I have to confess that they’d survived in better shape than I had. Ullages on old reds don’t come much better, do they?

I dug some of the floor out to gain more height but soon struck bedrock. Tracey bought me a small metal stool so at least I could sit down. She took pity on me, I think, emerging daily from the cellar looking like a pained pretzel. I ended up channeling Quasimodo, getting around dragging the metal stool behind me. The things we do for the love of wine!

Is there anybody out there?

We must’ve looked at close to 100 houses, and not a single one came with a cellar or a suitable space for one. What on earth is wrong with people? Are they really happy to drink 2-year-old reds that burn the enamel off their teeth? And 6-month-old Rieslings or Semillons that would make great paint strippers?

We decided to cast the net wider and ended up buying a much bigger house than we planned, just across the border in Shellharbour. It’s walking distance to the emerging marina at Shell Cove and to the old village, harbour and beaches. There was no cellar, but the garage was big enough to serve as a ballroom when the lockdown was over, so we decided to build a cellar in one corner of it.

Our builder suggested a commercial cool room, which we had made-to-measure by Campbelltown Coolrooms. The walls were made of 100mm thick, floor-to-ceiling polystyrene panels sandwiched by powder-coated steel. Tracey was thrilled that she could choose the Surfmist colour to match the walls. But, just after the materials were delivered, greater Sydney went into lockdown, and for reasons known to no one, Shellharbour was included. So, our builder couldn’t come in from Berry to install the thing. Bummer.

Tracey isn’t one to take no for an answer, so she hunted around for a cool room installer. Not easy to find, as it turned out. Over the next 10 weeks she spoke to as many tradesmen. 9 of them promised to pop in and quote but never turned up or didn’t even bother to return her calls or texts.

Meanwhile our entire cellar lived in the sitting room, and the weather was beginning to warm up …

Stairway to Heaven

The problem was that all the tradies in lockdown (or maybe their wives) had decided to fix all those things around their houses that they’d ignored for years. In the end we found Laurence, a builder from south of Nowra who called when he said he would, came when he promised, and did a perfect job despite some bits and pieces missing from the material CC had supplied.

The result resembles a sleek white bank vault. Temperature is stable and slow to change, with no need for air conditioning, which translates to a huge saving in electricity. The wines sit on 5 sets of $50 shelves, up to 6 boxes per shelf (36 bottles), so our 800 bottles have left enough room for an extra 400. There’s also room for a 6^th set of shelves should we ever need it.

The salient points:

Total Capacity: just under 1300 bottles
Total cost including racks and installation: $3650
No electricity needed, and nothing to break down or wear out
We’ve proved over 4 decades that constant temperature control is overkill.

And who needs humidity control in the age of the Stelvin closure? And do I really need to put my wines on display? Only if I want to impress friends and neighbours.

I could let the boxes go now that the environment is controlled, but why? Most of our wines are 6-packs of the same wine, with labels on the boxes.

Ready-made options

Grand Cru 290 – $4300 for a 92 bottle cabinet / fridge – ‘you cannot be serious’

Vintec 1000 Bottle Walk-in Wine Cellar – $24,000 at Harvey Norman. More details at Vintec. Fancy pull-out shelves, multiple temperature zones, air-conditioning, humidity control etc.

Underground Spiral Cellar – capacity unknown, $42,000 at thisiswhyimbroke. The name of the site says it all, doesn’t it?

If money is no object, there are of course many more fancy options

5 Luxury Homes With Exquisite Wine Cellars