The Art of Wine Cellaring & Cellar Design by Ash Rajan, French-certified Maitre Du Vin Du Bordeaux. Janney Montgomery Scott

“She is well preserved for her age” is often a crude, politically incorrect, sexist quip that emanates from the voice box of an ogling male. It’s a backhanded compliment at best, but showcases the centuries-old obsession we humans have about aging. It even inspires greeting card companies to pen age-centric humor in their birthday cards. Wine geeks indulge in the same obsession when they wax poetic about the age of their wines. The myth, they inadvertently espouse, is: the older the wine, the better.

Far from the truth, an older wine is only as good as its cellaring. From its genesis and in its voyage to barrel and bottle, the young grape gets its share of grooming from the land, the weather, the winemaker, the winery, shipper to steamer before its put up for adoption, dressed in its Sunday best, to land a bidder with the largest wad. This crib-to-chalice journey is long and hard and unintended aging is the price the young wine pays.

Yet most wines are ready to be had when they show up on the shelves because they were crafted for instant gratification. Then there are French Bordeaux and Burgundies which were meant to be put away for noble aging, some as much as 20 or even 30 years. A few years ago, I uncorked a Chateau Talbot 1961, perhaps Bordeaux’s best vintage ever. The arrogant maitre’d and our even more arrogant waiter (the customer is always wrong in France) at the three star Michelin bistro at Le Beaux in the south of France went through a frog-to-prince metamorphosis minutes after uncorking the Talbot as the heavenly whiff snaked its way around the intimate dining room carved out of the cliffs of LeBeaux. The guests applauded and we invited the waiter to share a sip of the heavenly juice. The wine had shown triumph of cellaring, a magnificent vintage and vintner. I should know: I have had a ’59, a ’45, even a ’78 – all glorious Bordeaux vintages – go vinegar on me, a legacy of poor cellaring prior to my acquiring them.

There’s grand aging and shock aging. The former is to be desired, the latter to be avoided. Grand aging occurs when a wine crafted for aging meets an owner who understands cellaring and has optimal cellaring infrastructure. That does not mean he or she should necessarily have an ornate cellar with all the cooling gizmos found in a nuclear reactor. Although I submit, it helps. The thrill of going to your cellar pre-party feels like time travel to another microclimate with the feverish anticipation to extract an aging beauty from her beauty sleep.

But if you are not planning a wine cellar, beware of shock aging. They are simple to remember. Wine hates light, noise, vibration and fumes. So a room with plenty of sunlight facing noisy traffic on one side and your garage fumes on the other, next to a washer and dryer would be akin to a death chamber for your wines. If you nodded to any of the above, dispatch your wines to the coldest part of your home, your basement. Or avoid storage altogether. The ‘eat what you kill’ approach – which translates to drink them as you buy them – works very well for most new world wines, including California, Australia, South Africa, Argentina and Chile. And as for storing yesterday’s unfinished wine, “fuggedaboutit” as my Brooklyn friends would say. Make sangria instead, with fresh cut oranges, apples and lemons.

Cellar As An Art Installation

My wine snob friends, like me, were early adopters of wine cellars. Think early 90s, much, much before the cellar obsession started and we have gone through at least two or three cellar avatars over the years. So we go blah! when confronted by the typical cellar-columns of oak, racked to resemble bee hives for your bottles, a token center table for tasting and the ugliest tile wine motif or a Tuscan painting on the wall to create a contrived wine mood. Go ahead and judge me. Yes! I am a cellar prude and to me, a cellar has got to sing and harmonize the wood, stone, glass and lights. And those exotic aromas of angel’s vapor. Mood evocation is a cellar’s first job, preservation, second. It is the foyer to your sensory world.

Mine hinged on the whimsical. It had the eye-feel of Pompei due to the frescoes on the wall and the cellar floor felt like a street in Morocco, distressed in claret. There were three micro-climates, one for the wine, another for the single-vineyard olive oils and yet another for raw milk cheeses to cure. Ancient mini-ampora (clay wine urns) that I picked up on my travels to Jerusalem and Istanbul competed with the Moroccan lace lanterns and the trickling sounds of a Tunisian water fountain. No question, it was a sensory overload, a cellar that tried too hard. No token tasting table but a ten-seater antique French butcher table on industrial wheels surfaced with cooperage marks of French barrel makers. And when every sensory nerve in my guests was crawling to the marathon line, they had to suffer one more act in this litany of a drama. This one was so unnecessary, but it was my invention, a cellar first, a carousel of 12 retro milk baskets representing twelve different wine regions, holding six bottles each. A discrete press of a button brought the desired region to your reach much like your shirts at the dry cleaners. Christened ‘Berry-Go-Round’ it charmed many a guest but suffered the wrath of that one person it was meant to impress, my wife Mariette, who thought it was the stupidest, silliest thing that she had ever seen. And her crusade was to tell every one of my guests that. The whole cellar thing to her, was such an indulgent waste of time. There you go.

I guess people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. No cellar put-downs since then from this wine writer.