Fine Wine Reserve

Ange: Hey guys, welcome, today we’ve got with Marc from the Fine Wine Reserve. So Marc maybe you could give a little bit of a rundown of what makes your cellar so great and you know more information about it. Marc: Sure. This is a professional cellaring. It’s a Fine Wine Reserve. What we do here is provide perfect conditions for cellaring wine, medium term or long term and what we put in place here is all the things that wine needs in order for it to age properly over the long term. Proper humidity levels, proper temperatures, also of course having stable temperatures, which is the actually most important thing about cellaring your wine properly, as well as darkness and lack of odor and things like that are important as well. Pax: It is pretty chilly in here, so what’s the temperature right now? Marc: It is 55 or 56ºF which is about 13ºC. Pax: And what type of humidity do you need for wines like this. Marc: Well, the key thing with long term cellaring of wine is to keep it within a minimum maximum. You don’t have to be perfectly stable like you do with temperatures but you want to keep it above 60% relative humidity in order to make sure that the tops of your corks remain moist because below 60% over long periods is not going to hurt for a week or two. The top of the cork will dry out and then it will crack, shrink and air gets in. So you want to be above 60% relative humidity all year long even when it’s minus 30º out in the winter time and you want to keep it below 80% not because it’s going to hurt the wine if it’s higher than that but labels can get damaged so people who have some very high end wines that they want to put in the shelves of your wine option you don’t want molder developing on your label DOES ALL WINE NEED A CELLAR Marc: A lot of people ask me, “should I be cellaring my wine or how do I take care of my wine.” The risk of losing business, but to be perfectly honest, 95% of the wines out there should not be cellared. Ange: They don’t need to be. Marc: And they should be, they’re meant to be to drink right now and only about 5% of all wines really are cellar worthy and the 5% require the kind of conditions that we have and the others. And now like you said if you’re starting to buy wine by the case because your freight is not going to be available next year or you're not buying from the LCB or buying from a wine agent which you have to buy it by the case, you can’t buy single bottles, very quickly you’re collection can start getting larger. If you buy ten wines by the case that’s a 120 bottles. So even if that’s ready-to-drink wine, in order to maintain it longer before it goes bad then you need this conditions as well. So any wines whether they are cellar worthy or not if they’re not being drunk between the next two or three year then you need to have proper conditions. If you’re buying some wines that you’re going to lay down for a little while, buy at least three. A lot of people are buying what for them is an expensive bottle and they buy just one and I think that’s a bit of mistake because often if you kind of spent that 50 dollars on a bottle of wine but normally you’re only drinking 20 dollar wines this is a big deal for you. Pax: Yeah. Marc: If you’ve only had that one bottle, you have a tendency of wanting to save it, save it, save it. I’m not going to open it, I’m not going to open and then you might save it too long Pax: Yeah. Marc: The other thing is once we do open it and it’s like the best wine you ever tried and you don’t have a second bottle or two to look forward to and as Ange said one of every 12 bottles is going to be corked so it could be corked too. So you always want buy two, a minimum of three bottles of each wine if it’s the kind of wine you’re laying down. If you drink it tomorrow and you love it, no problem you just go buy another one but if it’s something you’re laying down for a year, two or three or four that’s going to be available for year so buy a couple. FRIDGE vs CELLAR Marc: The wine fridges are good for wines that you’re going to be drinking in the next year. You’re going to have two years. But if you have wine that you’re going to be storing in a more than about that I think you really want to start looking at professional, either your own wine cellar or professional cellar. All my clients, I recommend that they still buy a wine fridge. You need to buy a small wine fridge because you want to have a stock of wine at home not just here and that wine fridge is perfectly good for keeping 20, 30, 40 bottles in a small wine fridge. You can have drink over the next couple of months or year and every now and then come here and stock up of what you plan on drinking to the next year. That’s usually the way most of the people have the private wine lockers working here. Ange: How many total lockers do you have here other than custodials, you’re big, big guys, what can you offer the average person? Marc: Well, for the self storage private wine lockers, right now we have a 112 and they range in size from eight cases or a 100 bottles up to a 100 cases, which is 1200. This is a bit of a collector central too in terms of just lover central. People are coming and going in the tasting room and so you do get to meet a lot of people who love wines and we have a lot of courses on things going on here so it’s kind of a nice place to hang out if you’re interested in wines because you just run into so many other people with similar passions. Ange: So thanks, I think what you’ve come up with is definitely advantageous to the industry and to the people and we cheers you for that. Marc: Thank you.