If you are a connoisseur of wine, chances are that you will at some point think of using wine as an investment. The commonest way of doing this is by buying a number of wine bottles, and then storing them under the ideal conditions for some time. After a few years, you will find that the value of the wine will likely have risen. In the best of cases, you may end up selling the wine for many times the cost of buying and keeping it. It has been estimated that when done carefully, using wine as an investment can rival other forms of investments such as stocks and bonds.
However, there are a couple of things you ought to keep in mind before starting such an investment. One of the most important of these is having a clear understanding of what conditions you need to store the wine under. Remember that when the wine is not stored properly, you are likely to run into a number of problems such as finding that it does not last as long as you want it to.
Some of the things that should affect your decision about how to store the wine include:
The type of wine you are thinking of stocking up on
Different wines have different characteristics. For instance, some types such as Pinot are not actually meant to be stored; you would be better off drinking them within a couple of weeks or months after getting them.
Different types of red wine have different characteristics under which they thrive. For instance, some types of grapes might produce a wine that ages most slowly at a particular temperature, and this might be different for a wine produced from grapes from a different part of the world. For this reason, you should consider spending some time and money finding out more about the type of wine you want to stock, and then use this information to figure out how to optimize the conditions for it.
How long do you intend to store the wine?
When you are deciding how much light to let into the cellar and how hot it should be, you also need to take into account the number of years you need to store the wine. The key thing to remember is that the presence of very harsh conditions such as too much light and heat will serve to increase the rate at which the wine matures. This means that the peak of the wine in terms of taste will be much sooner.
If you are going to hold on to the wine for only a few years before selling it, you might not need to make a huge fuss over issues such as what temperature to store the wine in. You can simply make a few minor modifications so as to prevent the wine from turning into vinegar. However, if you are interested in a long term storage horizon, you will definitely need to have more control over the environment in which the wine is stored. This often means investing in coolers and humidity sensors.
The environmental conditions
When making decisions such as what wine racks to use and so on, you also need to consider the issue of the environment in which the wine will be stored. For instance, if you are going to convert your basement into a cellar and intend to keep using it on a regular basis, you might want to invest in more sturdy wine racks. This way, the risk of topping your wine collection as you are doing something else in the basement will be reduced.
The environmental conditions will also determine which types of equipment you should get. For instance, if you intend to have a wine collection in a very hot part of the world, you might need to get a heavy duty cooling unit. This way, you can be sure that it will be more than capable of keeping the temperature within the basement to a level that is conducive to the wines.
Your future plans
The choice of what types of equipment to get for the storage of the red wine should also be determined by your future plans. For instance, are you going to expand the collection, or are you comfortable with what you currently have? If the former is the case, you may need to then figure out how large the collection is likely to be, and then get wine racks and other equipment that can accommodated it when it’s at its largest. The benefit of doing this is that once you are set, you will rarely need to renovate the cellar at any point in time after you start storing the wine. This is often not only expensive in some cases, but may also disrupt the other wines since you will have to subject them to more light and heat during the renovation process.
