The Wine Collector

I don't review many books on this blog but Living with Wine by Samantha Nestor was too tantalizing to pass up.  What wine collector wouldn't want a voyeuristic photographic tour of some of the most luxurious, tasteful, "high design" wine cellars in the U.S.?  After all, how could you possibly design a better one than your friends if you don't have sufficient examples to stimulate how high to set your standards?

"Wow" cellars

Living with Wine showcases 30 cellars in 256 pages including associated tasting rooms, storage areas, and some perspective from the owners (some of whom have celebrity status).  The cellars are split into five categories with names like "The Gentlemen's Haven" and "Urban Retreats and Inspiring Spaces."  Each cellar is aptly named too with appropriate (and clever) names like "The Man Cave". "Chelsea Girl", and "Morrocan Moods."

Various styles, sizes, and ambiances of wine cellars are depicted with large scale, glossy photos (including double page spreads to ensure you can fully capture the scale of some cellars).  I wasn't surprised the author works at Metropolitan Home magazine as that design flair comes through. The book is coffee-table sized (pages are 12 inches high by 11 inches wide) and its cover photo (see above) just begs you to open it.

The good news for those of you looking to use this book as a guide to finding the right resources for your own purposes is that Samantha included a detailed list of resources used to create each cellar from designers to architects to cooling system providers.

Bottom line: Every wine collector would love to have this book.  As the holidays approach, it's a great gift idea instead of the latest wine accessory or botltle of wine for your wine collector friends (or spouse).  The book retails for $75 but you can pre-order it at Amazon using one the links above for $47.25 (it releases in two days on October 27).

P.S. All book reviews such as this are offered to readers without receiving any compensation from book publishers (other than a free copy of the book to review) or commissions from book sales.

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. 

Designing high-end wine cellars is essentially a specialty art form conducted on a commission basis for wealthy individuals.  With the growing interest in wine collecting globally, it shouldn't be surprising that a globetrotting cellar designer has emerged to meet the needs of those who can afford the best. 

Cellarworks specializes in "architecturally distinguished" wine cellars 

Lee Zinser, started his firm, Cellarworks, in 1994.  His clients include a range of celebrities from the movie, TV, sports, and music industries (as well as some 5-star hotel groups) - sorry, I can't share any names because Lee's strict confidentiality policies don't permit him to tell me. Lee and I met in New York recently to discuss his business:

• They're designers not builders (meaning that Cellarworks' fees do not cover construction costs)
  
• Median fee (i.e., the "typical" project): $400,000-$500,000; minimum fee: $100,000
  
• Cellarworks differentiates itself by developing designs which integrate with the customer's wine lifestyle and which enable customers to demonstrate their wine sophistication by everything from the architectural concept/layout to the materials used in a design (e.g., the latest transparent nanotechnology film which provides complete UV and heat protection when applied to glass but which is otherwise undetectable). In short, they'll make you look smarter than you really are.
• After the cellar is designed, Lee's team including Nathan Woodson, a sommelier with Per Se in NYC, can also help recommend and procure wines on an ongoing basis.  Clients are even given Nathan's cellphone number to be able to reach him any time with their wine questions.
• Average of 20 cellars in progress simultaneously (including some for restaurants and hotels)
• Project duration - shortest is 6 months and the longest is 4 years (a home with many construction delays)
• Current projects are located in Beijing, Sydney, Italy (2), London, NYC tri-state area, Idaho, San Francisco, Los Angeles
  
• Offices in New York, Beverly Hills, London, and Sydney.
  

Vinfolio partnership 

Vinfolio has developed a partnership with Cellarworks in which we will introduce our interested clients to them and Cellarworks will offer various services (inventorying, VinCellar, buying and selling wine) to its clients enabled by Vinfolio.  Read a copy of the press release.

Example designs

Here are a few more of Cellarworks' designs to heighten your interest:

While everyone wants their cellar to look fantastic (see Wine cellars: Beauty over function), there are numerous functional elements which need to be considered in any design.  Loren Root, who is a Personal Cellar Manager at Vinfolio, offers some practical advice:

1. Double-deep bottle racking maximizes space and provides better bottle stability (loose bottles in bins can be precarious).
2. Minimize display rack angle to ensure the wine remains in contact with cork.
3. Use a larger standard bottle rack size - 4.5 inches is best to accommodate the full range of 750ml bottle sizes but you will lose some bottle storage capacity.
4. Avoid using shelves/bins for mixed bottle sizes - The moment you pull a bottle out of a group of mixed-size bottles, others will typically shuffle around, triggering one or two bottles to move down or even slide forward (potentially onto the floor).
5. Use wood or rubber-matted floors - This provides some protection against breakage if you drop a bottle.   If you use tiles, dark grout conceals the inevitable stain a little better.
6. Minimize diamond bins - Airflow and consistency of temperature/humidity throughout the cellar is improved with individual bottle racking.
7. Position double-deep bins for easy access - While useful if you buy wines by the case, don't locate them at floor level -- your back will thank you.
   
8. Plan for odd bottle sizes - Ensure you create rack or shelf space for half bottles, magnums, large format bottles, and Champagne (note: Champagne fits into the 4.5 inch racks noted above).
9. Storage in center islands or display tables - Add shelves or double-deep racking below the counter/table surface for increased capacity.
10. Choose rack material/design carefully - Labels will be scuffed moving wines in and out of racks (fact).  Some materials (like metal) are less forgiving than others or and some designs with sharper outward-facing edges tend to chew up your hands (and labels).  The stability of the bottle in the rack should also be evaluated (e.g., the rack shown at the right might not be the best choice if you live in earthquake country).

Note that Vinfolio is not in the business of designing cellars (other than providing input in an advisory capacity as a Personal Cellar Manager to a client).  But if you're in the market for a cellar designer, here are some suggestions from our "Other resources" page on our site.

Whether you build a custom cellar or buy wine storage cabinets, you have to decide on your home wine storage capacity. Keep in mind that there’s a difference between what you need and what you may want to have available. Determining factors for what you need include:

1. Your rate of consumption (including last minute dinner parties)
2. The breadth of your wine interests. How much variety do you want to be able to select from?
3. The frequency and ease of restocking (either from off-site storage or new purchases)

My cellar as an example

My wife and I drink wine often and frequently have friends over or take bottles to restaurants (which is easy in San Francisco). I like experimenting and would always prefer to open 6 different wines for an event instead of 6 bottles of the same wine. Most of my wine is stored at Vinfolio’s warehouse so it’s easy to bring more home. Considering these factors, my home cellar probably only needs to be a few hundred bottles and I know I could easily live within that limit (in reality, it holds up to 800 bottles).

The role of off-site wine storage

Most wine collectors get hooked on buying and tend to exceed the capacity of their home storage sooner or later. That’s when off-site storage is useful to capture the “overflow.” As an aside, Vinfolio has some customers who have moved in the past year and have decided to downscale the space allocated to their home cellar because of the ease of having wine delivered frequently from our wine storage facility.

Bottom line: The home wine storage capacity you need is totally unrelated to the total size of your wine collection.

BusinessWeek.com has an interesting article called “Sophisticated cellars” posted on November 22, 2006 with an attractive online slide show of some beautiful wine cellars by a number of well known cellar designers (including their price tags). While all wine cellars should deliver the same basic function of protecting your wine collection in ideal climatic conditions, the sky’s the limit on the potential cost of creating one.

As cellar designer Paul Wyatt comments in the article, cellars are “a specific symbol of power, of success.” The cellar’s role as a status symbol has no doubt driven a meaningful part of the 35% annual growth in the industry for the past five years. According to Jim Deckebach, the founder of Wine Cellar Innovations, the custom cellar industry now generates $500 million in sales annually.

For some great ideas of what can be done, I recommend getting Wine Cellars: An Exploration of Stylish Storage.