The Wine Collector

How soon would you know if the cooling or humidity in your wine cellar were outside of a desired range?  Are you checking it frequently?  What if you travel often or have multiple homes with wine cellars? 

Over the past 10 years, the cooling unit in my home cellar has failed three times.  It's not clear how many days passed each time before I noticed (fortunately, San Francisco is rarely even in the 70s).  The point is, the risk of having wine damaged by unforeseen events is real and the time and effort to replace what might be years of effort collecting special bottles is hard to even fathom.

The CellarSensor solution 

CellarSensor is a product and monitoring service from CellarCentral.com which enables you to monitor your wine cellar conditions (air temperature, bottle temperature, and humidity) remotely using sensors that communicate via the Internet every 15 minutes (24/7) to CellarCentral's data center.  One or more designated people can be notified by phone or email-based alerts (get a sample phone alert) in the event of various conditions occurring based on parameters you set such as:

• High temperature
• Low temperature
• High relative humidity %
• Low relative humidity %
• No data (such as might occur if a power failure) 

Charts and reports are also available (see sample).

The San Diego-based company was founded by Chris Womack, a former HP engineer, and launched its initial sensor products and monitoring service in March 2007. Chris went through multiple generations of designs and tests to arrive at his current product set which is manufactured to his specifications in Japan.

VinCellar integration

We liked CellarSensor so much we decided to integrate it into our new VinCellar cellar management application (see today's press release). When using VinCellar, users are able to link their CellarCentral.com account to their VinCellar account and see a widget of key condition metrics (for 1 or more cellars) on the home page of their VinCellar account. 

In addition, we decided to become a dealer for the hardware sensors to provide one-stop shopping for VinCellar users.  For clients of our Personal Cellar Manager service, we will install the sensors on-site and become one of the people assigned to monitor alerts.

How CellarSensor works

The diagram below says it all:

How much is it?

The major cost components are:

1. Base station
2. Air Temp/Humidity sensor
3. Liquid bottle temp sensor
4. Monitoring and alerting service 

A CellarSensor Starter Kit Standard (items 1 and 2 plus one year of monitoring) is $498.  A CellarSensor Starter Kit Plus (which adds #3) is $648.  Additional sensors are $199 each and up to a total of 16 can be supported with one base station (see product specification sheet for more details).  After the first year, the monitoring and alerting service can be extended in 1,2, or 3-year increments for $199, $379, or $559 respectively (roughly $15.50-$16.50 a month).

As signing up for CellarSensor is a form of loss prevention, we've checked with AIG and they are willing to offer a discount on their wine collection insurance to their policyholders for deploying CellarSensor.  Depending on how much wine you have insured, this could effectively underwrite the cost of most or all of the CellarSensor solution.  If you're an AIG policyholder (or want to investigate switching), contact Jennifer Wolf of AIG at 415-836-2790 or jennifer.wolf@aig.com.

Want to get it?

Just call us at 415-946-1300 during business hours or email service@vinfolio.com. 

If you're a regular wine consumer, you can no doubt remember some occasions when you've had too much to drink.  While you shouldn't be drinking and driving at all, at least developing a self-awareness of your exact blood alcohol level by using a breath alcohol testing device can help modulate your consumption or stop you from driving drunk.

In the future, you might also encounter an alcohol breath testing service as you depart a corporate or private event.  Springwise, the global trend-spotting site, posted a brief story about Blow Me, a UK-based company offering such services.  With a name like that, it's hard to believe they haven't been in the news more often.

Lest you thought Reidel's stemless "O" wine tumblers were the last innovation in wine glassware, a British friend visiting San Francisco recently for a tech conference spotted this "inside out" glassware at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  It's the work of a young Dutch designer (but apparently Brooklyn-based), Alissia Melka-Teichroew, also known by her initials AMT.

The description on her site about the Inside Out Collection states:

"The shape of a drinking glass reflects its content: columnar flute for champagne, curvy goblet for wine, short shot glass for straight liquor, stout highball for cocktails. But what if only the negative space of glasses assumes these iconic shapes? That’s the premise of AMT’s line of Pyrex glass barware. All glasses have the same outer shape, but pour in a drink and the glass’s inner identity appears."

P.S.   A pair of Champagne glasses goes for $60 at Charles & Marie.

This cool gadget can be pointed at a wine glass or bottle and immediately tell you the temperature to the tenth of a degree (F or C). Measuring only 2" x 4" and weighing only a few ounces, it's the perfect item to take along to restaurants to ensure your wine is served at the right temperature. It comes in its own soft sided case with a strap.

Vinfolio is giving one of these away (while supplies last) with any first-time wine purchase from us of $1,000 or more. A $59 dollar retail value, you can claim yours by visiting Vinfolio's wine store and placing a qualifying order. You must also either mention the "thermometer promotion" in the special instructions of your order or in an email to service@vinfolio.com after your ordered is placed. It is not for sale separately.

Give a decanter. Specifically, a magnum-sized decanter.

Many wine collectors will buy magnums (or larger formats) for long-term cellaring as they tend to preserve the wine better than 750ml bottles due to a lower ratio of oxygen to wine in the bottle. While most wine collectors may have a couple of decanters, they aren't likely to have a magnum-sized decanter.

In fact, of the 15 decanters I own, only two are for magnums. There is something festive about large format bottles and that same is true for magnum decanters. If you have a great bottle of wine (which is very likely to require decanting), why not present it in something beautiful? Britain's William Yeoward is one of my favorite sources for decanters and I personally own two of the classic but modern Geneviere design which comes in four sizes ranging from 400ml to 3200ml (sized for half bottles to double magnums).

Decanters may or may not have stoppers and many new designs avoid them for more flexibility in design. However, I generally prefer them with stoppers so I can avoid drinking too much and safely "gas" what is left for consumption over the following few days.

An article in today's Wall Street Journal called "Old wine, new bottle" (WSJ online subscription required) discusses the decanter market's growth. It points out that Reidel's sales of decanters doubled from 2004 to 2005 (now accounting for 10% of its business) and that it has introduced six new styles in 2006. Even Williams Sonoma has almost doubled its decanter offerings in the past two years to 17 today.

My final suggestion is to buy early as magnum decanters are harder to come by and the design you prefer may not be easily located at the last minute.