Cellaring Wine by Jeff Cox

Author:Jeff Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Published: 2003-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Building and Using the Wine Cellar

A cave dug into the cold, dark,

humid, motionless earth is the

perfect wine cellar. We need to re-create

those conditions as closely

as we can in our homes. It’s not

as difficult as it sounds.

CHAPTER 5

Constructing and Equipping a Wine Cellar

My first wine cellar was simply a shelf in the basement. Thank goodness it was in the basement, for I stocked it with one of my very first attempts to make wine, an attempt that ended in disaster, as you will see.

My friend John and I drove to Newark, New Jersey, to pick up a few 40-pound boxes of Alicante Bouschet grapes from California that had arrived by rail car. I took two boxes home and fermented 80 pounds of grapes in a crock. After what seemed like a decent interval, when the fizzing had pretty much subsided, I poured the wine through cheesecloth into rinsed-out wine bottles and stoppered them with corks that I pounded in with a mallet. Then I put on labels using a glue stick and laid the bottles on the open shelves in the basement. The next day I noticed that the corks were inching their way out of the necks. Evidently, some gas was still being produced. Remembering that the French wire hoods over their Champagne corks, I got some wire, pushed the corks back in, and wired them down tight. A few days later I heard crashing in the basement and went down to find bottles exploding. The fermentation was obviously continuing, and gas would not be denied. The bottles were not meant to be placed under internal pressure, and the corks were wired on so securely that the only way out for the carbon dioxide being produced by the yeast was through the glass.

I also had an old chest freezer in that basement that had lost its Freon and was inoperative. If any other bottles exploded on me, the freezer would contain the damage. So I began to lay wine bottles on their sides in there. I didn’t realize that no air movement, darkness, and humidity are the perfect conditions for mold. Soon all my handmade labels were turning greenish black.

However, I also didn’t realize then that my basement had almost perfect conditions for a wine cellar. Because I heated the upper floors of the century-old farmhouse with a woodstove, the basement, sunk below ground and with half its floor bare earth, remained a fairly consistent 55°F to 60°F year-round. You often hear that a wine should be served at room temperature; that really means cellar temperature. And a cellar in much of Europe, where these notions began, stays a fairly constant 58°F year-round with some fluctuation down in winter and up in summer. A constant 58°F is exactly what a bottle of fine wine needs to age itself toward perfection.

It was also dark down in that basement, unless I switched on the light. And the bare-earth half of the cellar kept the relative humidity at about 70 percent — again, just about exactly what a bottle of wine wants to age properly.

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