My new best cellar
Dig deep for the wine-lover in your life, says Jonathan Ray Iknow what I want for Christmas and it ain't socks or handkerchiefs, thanks very much. I want a cellar. A grownup, temperature-controlled, computer-catalogued cellar with lots of racks and bins for bottles, shelves for books, benches for decanting. I want the whole shebang.
I'm fed up with cracking my head every time I go to the Cupboard of Cobwebs under the stairs in search of a special bottle.
In my line of work I'm lucky enough to get sent a lot of wine — at a rough count there are now 300 bottles encircling me in my study — and I buy a bit too. The trouble is there's nowhere to put it all. The cupboard is groaningly full and I need to drink as fast as I can just to keep a path clear from my desk to the door. Heaven knows what Elfin Safety would say.
When I worked for Berry Bros & Rudd we stored wine for a number of customers, one of whom used to call regularly to ask whether he might come and look at his bottles. He clearly fancied that his purchases were gathering picturesque layers of dust in our 300year-old cellars in St James's Street when in fact they lay snug in sealed boxes in a modern temperature-controlled warehouse off a roundabout in Basingstoke. We put him off each time, anxious not to disillusion him He once rang back to check that we were turning his bottles of vintage port regularly `to keep them fresh'. We assured him that we weren't and explained why.
Like him, I store the few cases of topnotch stuff I own at the merchants whence they came. I long, though, to be able to sit down at home to admire the maturing bottles and talk grandly of 'popping to the cellar for some Sauternes'.
And it appears that I am not alone. Investing in wine has become all the rage and the well-heeled are falling over themselves to buy wine and build fancy-dan cellars in which to show off their Cm Classe clarets and marvel at how much their hard-earned scratch has bought them. David Roberts, an old chum from Berrys, set up his own wine consultancy a couple of years ago to meet such demand. He advises some 600 clients on their purchases, each of whom spends between £5,000 and £150,000 per year on wine.
'Business is booming,' he says. 'Fewer people are inheriting wine these days and with Russia and the Far East entering the market there is less wine to go round. It makes sense to be proactive and build a portfolio, because if you don't buy en primeur, you often won't get another chance to buy such wines when they're mature. Demand for First Growth claret, Grand Cru Burgundy and fine Rhone is rocketing, but supply is finite.'
Since wine is seen as a wasting asset, it is not subject to capital gains tax, and most of David's customers lay down wine not just for drinking but also for capital growth. And it makes a tax-efficient way of passing assets from one generation to another. One friend of mine reckons that by dint of shrewd buying and selling of wine he has put two sons through public school. And, as David points out, if the investment goes pear-shaped, you can always drink it.
'We've never been so busy,' concurs Sebastian Riley-Smith, MD of Smith & Taylor Private Cellars. 'We used simply to store and manage wine on behalf of our clients, but demand has led us to specialise in the design and build of custom-made cellars too.'
Riley-Smith makes bespoke cellars that range from wine cabinets which hold 500 bottles to whole rooms which accommodate thousands (and cost six figures). Having seen one of these hand-crafted beauties (between a dining room and an indoor swimming pool, since you ask), all glass, maple and oak alcoves with individually controlled temperature and humidity and low fibre optic lighting, I am completely smitten. Wine is clearly no longer to be consigned to the dark downstairs, but to be shown off in the light upstairs.
'Everyone wants the wow factor,' says Riley-Smith. 'In an age where interiors count for so much to so many, a wine room off a dining room, or a wine cabinet within a kitchen, can achieve a two-fold statement both in the quality of the space in its own right and in the quality of the contents. Simply put, wine has become both an interior design and a social statement.'
Dear Santa....
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