Wine Investment Is Very Different To Wine Collecting
If you’re looking for tips on cellaring wine for investment, this isn’t the time or place. In fact, wine investment is a vastly different animal to wine cellaring. There are many London wine investment companies that will help you make a profit on wine.
This is about the physical - as opposed to the strictly financial - enjoyment gained from laying a bottle down.
Let’s start with a bit of Wine Cellaring 101.
Wine lives; it breathes; it ages.Between birth and death it leads a simple solitary life, preferring a quiet, dark place where the temperature doesn’t fluctuate wildly and where there’s a level of humidity.
Quiet? Wines hate vibration. Jigging about disturbs wine, moving the sediment that often lies at the bottom of ageing bottles making for murky wines.
Dark place? Well, it has to be cool (around 15-16 degrees celsius) and dark places are generally cool. Dark places also don’t have ultraviolet light, a wine bottle’s worst enemy. This can shine on bottles, penetrating the glass and producing nasty reactions in wine. (Mental note: Never buy a wine that has been sitting on display in a window or under ultraviolet light).
Temperature? It’s incredibly important because wine bottles don’t appreciate significant variations in temperature between day and night and between the seasons. Collectors normally like an annual variation in temperature of not more than five to eight degrees celsius.
Humidity? Prevents ‘cork shrink’ - an unattractive but brutally honest appraisal of what happens to corks that dry out over the years in conditions that are way too dry. Relative humidity around 70-75 per cent is ideal.
As you can see, there’s generally some thought needed when cellaring wine - it makes those wooden racks near the heating duct at home suddenly look like torture chambers.
Get rid of the rack. If your partner bought it, don’t get rid of the rack, but only put wines in it that you are going to use daily. They can take the short-lived pain, others can’t.
