Don't Get a Wine Cellar
I, of Course, Love Mine
When my parents got divorced, they asked me to remove my belongings from my childhood home before they sold it. It was not a convenient time for me. I’m sure they were also going through some emotional stuff, but I had just graduated college. I was finding a job, an apartment, new friends, and a way to avoid any physical injuries since I didn’t have health insurance. Where to put my stuffed animal collection and my glass animal collection was low priority. The world is just lucky that I didn’t have an animal animal collection.
As I sorted baseball cards, albums, posters, and concert shirts, I swore that I would never again have an emotional relationship with physical objects. I would only buy things that had utility.
This is how the mistake starts:
You stack a few bottles in the kitchen, thinking that it would be nice to have a red on hand to go with dinner. And a couple of whites. A sparkling. A rosé, for sure. And that special bottle your obnoxious friend gave you for your birthday instead of something you actually wanted. You really should get a rack. Those look cool.
You start to buy more wine at the store than you need for the week. Which you can store in a wine refrigerator. Those don’t look cool but you convince yourself they do.
You are now a collector. With an emotional relationship to a foodstuff. That you will consume. You have purposely put yourself in the situation of a 4-H kid with a livestock project.
If you want to drink old bottles of wine, buy them at auction the week you want them. If you make cassoulet, get a Cahors at the wine store on the way home from buying the duck and sausage. You don’t need to store bottles. They’re food. You buy food a week ahead at most. I know you’re not supposed to store wine because even Costco sells bottles individually.
How pathetically aspirational is a wine cellar? You know the really cool looking ones with a dinner table or club chairs? How many minutes do you think you want to sip and eat in a room that is at most 55 degrees? If someone invited you to an outdoor dinner party in Boston in March, the only way you’re saying yes is if it’s the fourth month of the COVID pandemic. And even then, looking back, you should have eaten inside.
When we bought our house in Los Angeles from a man-child director, I turned the temperature controlled room in the cellar he built for comic books into a wine cellar.
It still cost me about $10,000 to build. Plus I pay to keep it cooled to 55 degrees. Which means that each of the 500 bottles of wine I can store there costs me more than an extra $20 per bottle. Sure, some of the bottles are now worth $20 more than I paid for them, but not most of them. In fact, some aren’t even worth $20. And I will not get that money back when I sell my house because no one wants a wine cellar. Especially now that no one drinks alcohol. My real estate agent might as well tell potential buyers that we have a Fentanyl Parlor.
But I love my wine cellar. I go down there nearly every day, like it’s my own wine store.
It serves two purposes. I keep a wide variety of cheaper wines in a waist-high section so that no matter what I cook, I’ve got a solid pairing. But the top and bottom shelves are for aging wines. In other words: Collecting.
Emotionally, though, wines serve the opposite function of baseball cards, which tried to preserve the past. When I look at my old wine bottles, they’re a reminder of my mortality. They’re a package of raspberries – only instead of them going bad quickly, it’s me. In moments where I let myself actually feel - fear, sadness, joy - I grab one to open with friends, family, or my lovely wife Cassandra, in order to try to create a moment in the present out of the past.
I’m envious of your wine room. Fabulous! I have to “make do” with two large wine refrigerators in a utility room, and a “Jesus Christ” in the kitchen that came with the house. There is also an overflow closet. It is even more absurd given that I seem to drink wine the most at Mirabelle and Augustine. I tell my lovely spouse that I am stocking up for retirement when I no longer have disposable income. That usually warrants an eye roll. That said. I do enjoy having all the bottles around to rummage through from time to time just to remember what I have.