Sunday, January 28, 2007

Thinking About Wine Cellars…..

The number of wine cellars, wine cellar builders, wine cellar catalogs, and just plain articles and books about wine, and wine cellars has been growing by leaps and bounds in the USA, Asia, and Europe. This market has been growing almost as fast as the growth in new wineries, new wines, and new wine regions. My father told me that they are even growing grapes and making wine in England now, something that has not occurred since the Romans left. (Of course these new English wines are probably not much better than those made by the Romans).
Quite a number of books have been published about actually building wine cellars as home projects. They mostly cover the basics of construction, insulation, vapor barriers, and generally clunky wine rack systems in some detail and then go on to talk about collecting and tasting wine. Most of the writers seem to have built their own cellars and then write a book from the experience gained, with photographs taken during construction and while celebrating afterwards.
If you think that a wine cellar is just a special room or refrigerated closet where you keep wine safely until it is ready to drink, and you want someone to tell you how to drink it when it is ready, then any of these books will be adequate for your purposes. You could get started right away, open a bottle to see if it is ready, skip over my convoluted ramblings and just read the good bit at the end.
I would like to get to the drinking of properly aged wine with good friends and special food items in my wine cellar eventually, but I have to ask questions, and these questions often lead to more questions than answers. But why, you might ask?
All of a sudden, I have this compulsion to behave like a small boy and ask the very same question. I will now have to explore a winding road back to the beginning of time to find out. (Perhaps not the beginning of time, but at least to a time when we lived in caves if we were lucky)
Given the choice of living at home and going to the local school, or being packed up and sent to board at a formal English Public school in Winchester for several years, my decision was an easy one. At eleven years old, I was to leave home for the first time, go to a boarding school hundreds of miles away (well not hundreds perhaps, this was in England after all), knowing nothing except that it was a very big change in my life. This somehow seemed more attractive than the certainty of going school with Noddy Hardy, the big guy living up the street, who had promised to get me for some perceived transgression. Perhaps it was for using long words in sentences, but I do not remember.
At this point, I must apologize because I have suddenly perceived endless vistas of paragraph headings and realized that this subject cannot be covered with one bottle, and this one is empty. This was supposed to be a sort of synopsis of a book about wine cellar design that I am writing to package around color plates of wine cellars from my archives but I got stuck last week and really need an editor now.


Please be patient, and I will try and release a chapter or two every now and then... If anyone has any feedback or questions to add to my list, please write.
© Paul Wyatt 2007.

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