Out of the Dark: Musty Old Wine Cellars Go Upscale

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Whether its a serious wine collector?or someone who just dreams of being one?a well-designed cellar will preserve vino and enhance a home’s value
Whether its a serious wine collector?or someone who just dreams of being one?a well-designed cellar will preserve vino and enhance a home’s value

RISMEDIA, December 19, 2006?A serious wine collection can be an enjoyable investment and add a personal touch to a home, but it can sour your financial grapes when it is not properly cared for.

Jamie Ritchie, who heads Sotheby’s U.S. wine department as an appraiser, sometimes has to break the bad news to collectors who have poured thousands of dollars into vintage wines but failed to take storage precautions.

“The most important thing you can do for your investment is to make sure the storage conditions are absolutely correct,” he says. So it’s no surprise that wine cellars, once thought of as simple racks in dark, musty basements, are getting luxury makeovers that stress perfect function as well as elegant form. Think of them as insurance policies on the one hand and showrooms on the other.

Many wine-cellar designers around the country can assess your collection and your space, and build a room that suits your budget and the way in which you intend to interact with your collection. Novice collectors with fewer than a thousand bottles will typically opt for a cellar with basic racking and a high-performance climate-control system that ensures proper aging. An adequate start-up cellar begins at about $8,000.

Air-conditioned comfort

But for connoisseurs with larger collections, there are no limits on what these designers can build. Custom racks built from cherry, teak or mahogany with curved corners, low-voltage display lighting, stone-tile floors and fully furnished tasting rooms are a few of the most in-demand extravagances you can have?for a price. For a wine cellar that would make any Frenchman envious, expect to pay between $25,000 and $250,000.

“A properly built wine cellar is the foundation to the security and aging of your vintage wines,” says Matthew Germano of Germano Wine Cellars. The Nashville, Tenn., designer’s priorities when building a wine cellar of any size or cost is installing vapor barriers, insulation, cooling systems, ventilation and weather-tight doors. All of these are essential to creating and maintaining a stable temperature of about 55 degrees and humidity of about 70% wine’s preferred climate.

Once climate control is in place, designers can begin to shape the room around the collection and your tastes. Ed Loughran of Charles River Wine Cellars in Wellesley, Mass., says, “The more valuable the collection, the more likely the client (will) want to showcase it.”

A Roman fantasy

For a 2,000-bottle collection estimated to be worth more than $150,000, Loughran and his team built an elegant yet modern cellar with custom display shelving, low-voltage display lighting and mahogany casing that accented the most cherished bottles of the collection. To make the space more functional, they added a tasting room with a flat-screen television and sound system. In all, the cellar and tasting room cost the client about $75,000.

Frequently, wine collectors prefer to make a bold statement about their collection by commissioning a themed cellar. Designers at The Wine Outfitters in Portland, Ore., recently were given a family photograph taken in front of a Roman aqueduct in France to use as a launching point for a new cellar. The designers lived up to the challenge, creating a rustic Roman feel in the two-room space by using wall frescoes, stone arches, mosaic-tile floors and murals.

Jim Deckebach, the founder of Cincinnati’s Wine Cellar Innovations, the country’s largest custom-wine-cellar business, built his first cellar in 1984 and has watched the industry come into its own over the 22 years since. “When I started, a fraction of 1% of the population wanted to own a wine cellar. Now the income level at which people are investing in a wine collection is going down, and there’s a lot of interest in cellars,” Deckebach says.

Moving upstairs

Though no definite numbers are available, Deckebach estimates that the industry is worth about a half a billion dollars and says it has grown by at least 35% a year for the past five years. This growth has led to some surprising changes in people’s attitudes about the function of the wine cellar.

All of the cellar designers BusinessWeek.com spoke with for this article reported an increase in business with home builders, and most pointed out the growing trend of wine storage areas coming out of the basement and inhabiting first-floor areas in closer proximity to the kitchen or living room.

In some cases, people trying to sell their homes will install a state-of-the-art wine cellar as a lure for buyers, regardless of whether they have a collection of their own.

“A wine collection doesn’t look like much, but properly presented it shows its true colors,” says wine-cellar designer Paul Wyatt. “My clients understand that a wine cellar is far more than a place to store wine. It is a specific symbol of power, of success.”

For more information, visit msn.com.

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