Forget about wine cellar equipment for their McMansions, the super rich have an underground wine vault 100ft under the Wiltshire countryside in Southern England. Formerly Eastlays mine, a source of honey-colored Bath stone, it is now Octavian Vaults’s Corsham Cellars, the place where the rich and famous hoard their most precious bottles of Petrus, Lafite or Latour. It’s like a bank storing liquid gold and run by one of the world’s relatively few specialist wine storage companies. Octavian Vaults is the only place you can get a “Certificate of Pristine Storage”.

Documented wine storage conditions along with provenance is vital to maintaining a wine’s value. A wine known to have crossed the Atlantic twice is likely to raise a much lower price at auction than one that has moved only once in its life, from chateau to a reliably cool wine storage facility. Other than the trip to Corsham itself, many of the wines at Corsham Cellars have moved only a few yards between different owners’ stacks in the wine vault, either through sales at auction, via merchants, or from one customer to another.

The caverns are 100 ft underground resulting in a constant temperature of about 13.5 deg C/56.3 deg F. They can be reached only by two heavily guarded, half-mile shafts, one of them serviced by a small, lumbering hydraulic-powered train that transports wine in and eventually out of the cellars. Many clients like to visit their wine to check its condition. They have to walk down 157 steps, carrying an emergency underground kit (i.e. gas mask and flashlight since the property is still officially classified as a mine) to get to the heart of the cellar. They can inspect the security measures if they choose, including motion-sensor beams used to protect bank vaults.

As buyers become more and more concerned about authenticity and the precise fill level in bottles before a sale (the lower it is the warmer the wine has probably been kept), or if they simply don’t care for a trip to Wiltshire to check on their investment, there are three photographic studios underground so that high-quality pictures of the wine can be taken at any time and sent to the client’s desktop. And should they have a special occasion to celebrate, customers can ask for a crate or even single bottle to be sent anywhere in the world to impress their guests.

Corsham Cellars already stores around 5 million bottles of fine wine, some worth thousands of dollars each. It’s the size of 20 football fields with tons of room for expansion. That’s good because with 2009 Bordeaux promising to be a particularly excellent vintage and lucrative markets booming in Asia, they’ll need it.

AXVKXDKFHZGG 



This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog

Bordeaux wine lovers may credit the 1855 Exposition Universelle de Paris and Emperor Napoleon III’s “Official Classification” with putting Bordeaux wine on the map. But, it turns out that his grandmother the Empress Josephine, first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte may have ignited French passion for the wine.

Prior to Josephine raising the status of Bordeaux to an elixer fit for nobility, it was seen as an inferior product suitable only for the English who had been stubborn lovers of claret, or red Bordeaux wine, for four centuries. At the time of the French Revolution, Burgundy and Champagne reigned supreme, in fact, not a single bottle of Bordeaux is known to have been kept in the wine cellars of King Louis XVI.

When Marie-Josephe-Rose de Tascher de La Pagerie (aka Empress Josephine) died in 1814, she left a heap of unpaid bills and a golden legacy to social historians. Marie-Josephe-Rose, was among other things, a great connoisseur and collector of clothes, and an innovative gardener and botanist. The written inventory of her final possessions at her chateau west of Paris has inspired studies and exhibitions on subjects as varied as the fashion trends and gardening styles of the early 19th century.

Josephine was also a celebrated hostess and, although not a great drinker, a great collector of wine. The official inventory of her possessions at her death includes more than 13,000 bottles of wine from all over the world, from Cyprus, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal as well as South Africa and Hungary. The empress also kept hundreds of bottles of rum from her native Martinique, which she used in rum punches and served at dinner parties in gilded bowls.

Josephine’s chambermaid described her as a “very sober woman.” She was partial to very sweet wines including champagne, but drank it all with moderation – like Napoleon.

The Emperor Napoleon’s favorites were Burgundy and Champagne, but he also grew fond of South African wines during his time in exile on Saint Helena, the South Atlantic island where he died in 1821 at age 52 – not far from Cape Town.

Study of Josephine’s 1814 “wine list” reveals something that may seem unsurprising but was, at the time, extraordinary. Almost half of her bottles and barrels came from vineyards around Bordeaux, little known chateaux that later would become some of the greatest names in wine: Latour, Lafite, Margaux and Haut-Brion.

Was the Empress Josephine the cause of the great switch in French wine tastes which allowed the vineyards of Bordeaux, and especially the great chateaux of the Medoc, to emerge by the mid-19th century as the most prized wines in France and the world?

This is one of the subjects explored in an entertaining exhibition, La Cave de Josephine (Josephine’s Cellar), which has started at the Chateaux de Malmaison, where Josephine lived for the last 15 years of her life, and died in June 1814, aged 50.

The exhibition, which will move to Germany and Italy next year, also examines other changes in the art de vivre of the French nobility which followed the fall of the monarchy. Before the Revolution, an aristocratic French dinner-party was a kind of immense, stand-up buffet in which all dishes were served at once. Wine glasses were kept on trays by servants and topped up as required.

After the revolution, France gradually adopted the “Russian” style, now universal, of serving different, sit-down courses one after another. Wine glasses began, to be placed permanently on the table. These changes were driven partly by the post-Revolutionary lack of legions of low-paid servants. France had also finally cracked the “industrial secret” of how to make crystal wine glasses, something previously known only to the British.



This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog

I don’t know if they still do, but at one time the Chinese called America Gum Shan, the mountain of gold, a symbol of opportunity and the chance to get rich. Today, the Chinese have found another symbol of opportunity whose very name beckons the ambitious. In French Lafite means small hill, in Chinese it is very similar to the word lai-fat or “come get rich.”

It is this association with wealth and opportunity that has made Chateau Lafite-Rothschild and it’s second wine Carruades de Lafite the currency of choice for negotiating Chinese business deals. Which bottle you get depends on who you are and what is “requested”. In China, anything with Lafite in the name sells be it Bordeaux or Burgundy. As such, both wines are becoming literal mountains of gold for owners of bordeaux futures.

Chateau Lafite and its second wine, Carruades de Lafite, continue to defy the fine wine market, with prices of both continuing to rise week on week. Lafite 2008 is currently trading at around $6,000 per case, rising in price by around $140 per week, even though it is not due to be bottled until next year. Margaux 2008, in contrast, is trading at just over $3200.

Carruades 2008 is still at around $1600, but it is predicted to keep climbing closer to the other first growths once in bottle. Gary Boom, managing director of the Bordeaux Index, told decanter.com, ‘Today a case of Carruades 2004 would set you back $2900, which is considerably more than the $2600 you would pay for a case of Mouton 2004.

The September Liv-ex report also looks at the phenomenon of the “seemingly unstoppable Brand Lafite”, reporting that Carraudes has bucked the trend of price drops during the financial crisis, and that on average, recent vintages are now 22% more expensive than they were at the peak of the market in June last year.

“Asia has made up its mind on this brand,” said Boom, “and completely ignores either vintage effect, or Parker scores.”



This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog

Chateau D’Arche, a Grand Cru Classe producer of Sauternes (dessert or sweet wine of Bordeaux) has started bottling its La Perle d’Arche wine in 100ml test-tube shaped bottles aimed at young drinkers in nightclubs. On the whole this seems to be a good idea since Sauternes is not well known outside the wine community, not to mention that french wine sales are on the decline so they’ve got to do something to shake things up.

But what’s troubling is their marketing, once again targeting women. Managing director Jerome Cosson told decanter.com: “We want to work with nightclubs to give customers the choice between vodka for the man and Sauternes for the lady. The idea is to put lots of them in a big ice bucket on the bar.”

A winemaker targeting women usually goes the low calorie wine route, like the just released French Wine Research Center’s “So Light” at 60 calories a glass and 9% alcohol. A 100ml serving of Sauternes is about twice the calories and 13% alcohol minimum. So while women may be relieved that they don’t have to deal with yet another winemaker trying to jam tasteless wine down their throats, seriously, do women have a problem with choice in alcoholic beverages at a bar? If a woman wants a glass of wine instead of vodka, she can simply order it.



This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog

A San Francisco cooperative is selling futures in a new wine called “Bailout,” inspired by the economic crisis. Crushpad, a custom crush facility, will sell the Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon at $39 per bottle. But there’s a twist, for every 100-point drop in the Dow Jones from the date of purchase to the projected bottling date of 14 August 2009, the final price will be discounted $2 per bottle. If the Dow is higher on the bottling date, the price is still $39 a bottle, making Bailout futures a minor hedge on the economy. Only 500 cases will be produced. Crushpad is doing this for fun and exposure, but it may be instructive for high-end Bordeaux winemakers who refuse to lower their exorbitant 2008 futures prices given the current environment. According to those in the wine trade, Bordeaux must lower it’s prices by 50% or the 2008 en primeur campaign could be a disaster. Crushpad is an urban winemaking facility that enables budding entrepreneurs to make their own wine with the expert help of the staff.



This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog

Click here for more information about Bordeaux wine appellations and classed growth system.



This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog

Click here for more information on the effects of global warming on the wine industry.



This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog

For the wine investor, absolutely! But for the wine drinker, it’s much more complicated. Hugh Johnson (the world’s best-selling wine writer) declares in his 2008 Pocket Wine Book that, “Vintages used to be really crucial but the difference now is not so much in quality as reputation, because the most famous ones are traded up to ridiculous prices. The reasons people buy a particular wine are complex but have a lot to do with snobbism.

“If you sold a nonvintage bordeaux nobody would buy it. It would be just as good, but it would not have the romance and the interest.”

More Info on Bordeaux Wine Vintages and Their Effect on Pricing



This is a post from: The Wine Cellar Blog