WINE NOTES

Setting up a simple wine cellar at home will mean you’ve got the right wine on hand whatever the occasion.

As the silly season fast approaches (I know, yikes!) having a decent stock of wine on hand becomes exponentially more useful. Technically, any collection of wine is a cellar, though the term tends to conjure up images of dusty underground rooms full of expensive, fine wines, stored in a precise manner until some distant time. It all seems very serious, not to mention time-consuming and costly. But a wine cellar doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, there may be serious and perhaps pricey bottles intended for long-term care, but mostly cellars function as a selection from which you can draw no matter what the occasion demands. That might be Friday night fizz to have with fish and chips, the perfect white for impromptu afternoons with friends, or good stocks of a bargain red for the summer barbecue season.

Of course, a cellar also allows you to squirrel away wines that are intended to reach their peak many years from now, allowing you the pleasure and discovery of experiencing the evolution of fine wine, not to mention a great excuse for a future fabulous dinner party of aged treasures. While the more robust red wine styles tend to be the mainstay of a cellar, New Zealand’s climate, cuisine and winemaking prowess all demand a fair share be devoted to white wine.

I like to store my wines in boxes with the anticipated drinking windows written on the outside, for example ‘drink 2020-2025’, so things don’t get forgotten.

It’s also really handy to have a solid collection of earlier drinking whites and reds for your regular enjoyment – your ‘house wines’ as it were – not least as this enables the more special numbers to grow old unmolested.

I’d happily tuck away any of the featured wines in my own cellar, but you should build your own collection to suit your tastes and needs. After all, that is the best thing of all about a cellar – having your very own, personally tailored wine shop, right there at home.