One of the fun things is that you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage. So there are online forums where people will buy a case and open one bottle a year and report their results on how the quality changes over time.
This is a hidden benefit of belonging to a wine club. Often you can talk to the wine maker and/or they are opening enough bottles regularly that they can give you a sense of when it's time to drink. After you've been through a few years of the syrah or the cab sav, you get a sense for yourself too because you start to get the pulse of what the winemaker is making.
This is actually the first year in a long time that I have a batch aging -- using wild grapes growing on my property. The first wine I ever made (from a kit), unbeknownst to me, needed to be aged to taste good. Once I learned that, I did the same test: every few months I'd open a bottle and taste it. After a year, most of the "tarry" flavors were gone, after 3 it was getting good. At five I really liked it. Unfortunately, no bottles survived to the 10-year mark, but I did learn to make wines that matured a lot faster!
A regular household fridge costs something like $100/year to run. My fridge has 20 cubic feet of volume, which is something like 500 liters. This suggests we can fit at least 100 bottles into it. This gives us $1/year as upper bound for storage costs per bottle. This is upper bound, because air conditioning costs go down with volume, due to square-cube law.
Point is, if the price premium was driven mostly by storage costs, it would be significantly lower than it actually is.
Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do), insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on. If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
This is right, I forgot about this: at 5% interest rates, 5 years of storage is actually 25% of the original price, which is probably substantial factor.
> Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do),
My kitchen fridge example was only meant to provide an estimate for the cost. Controlling humidity upwards is not expensive at all, it’s even cheaper in fact than controlling temperature.
> insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on.
These are extremely cheap at scale. You don’t really need backup power generation, the wine won’t spoil from few hours or even days of inappropriate temperature.
> If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.
My point was rather that the mere cost of storage is not the main part of the premium. Capital cost is probably significantly higher, but what is probably even higher still is speculation premium: not all wine vintages are appreciating equally, and if you just buy random wines, they will likely won’t appreciate all equally over time.
There are some fridge-like "wine cellar" contraptions that work well (keep optimal air quality / temperature).
Or a basement does the trick if the humidity is right (needs to be high but not too high)
I remember when I was a kid, my parents had a room in the basement for storing wine that was entirely airtight, with an AC-like device that controlled the air. That’s probably extremely overkill if you aren’t a wine buff (& storing huge quantities of it) though
for industrial climate control on wines? if you remove the improved drinkability that comes with age, and the scarcity and desireability of well-known chateaux it absolutely does.
There are companies that specialise in storing wine portfolios and you'd be amazed at how much they charge, wine in bottles takes up a lot of room and is really heavy.
I guess what I'm asking is if there's some special storage requirements which can't be met at home?
But yes, with care a hobbyist can do better than how some retail wine is kept.
Edit: The main points are 1) cool (~55F/13C), 2) dark, 3) not too dry (70% humidity is usually recommended. This is to protect the cork), and 4) store on its side, also to protect the cork from drying out. Five years is a long time.
Most retail wines are made to drink now though. If it's on the shelf it's ready.
Unfortunately, simply digging a hole in your back yard only gets it to the average temperature of your area which may be quite different to that hypothetical wine cellar in France.
In the end keeping even a fairly large room at whatever temperature and humidity level you desire isn’t that difficult, assuming you have the space and budget.
The whole idea of "sealing" wine in a bottle is to keep it and not actually change it. It's a preservation method. However, the bottle is not really completely sealed and the small air gap at the top is not empty either. The cork might allow a tiny amount of air transfer too. The remains of the wine creation process might also leave some reactive components.
When you store wine it seems that a cellar type environment with its stale and earthy air helps - hmmm I wonder why!
Challenge your tastes or whatevs. For example you might find that a really cheap bottle of white chilled to about 5C and fizzed in a Soda Stream makes quite a decent Champagne analogue.