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Photography courtesy of Sprial Cellars
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It’s time to bring out that burgundy you’ve been saving. You have two choices.
You can reach alongside the refrigerator, where you’ve shoved a half-dozen bottles, upright and overheated, next to dusty coils and a thrumming motor.
Or you can descend into a cool, damp, dimly lit cellar and select from a thousand or so bottles laid lovingly on their sides, where their corks won’t dry and shrink to let in air that oxidizes the wine.
A properly cellared wine is like a good second marriage: no longer young, with harsh acids, separated fruit, and edgy tannins, but mellowed by maturity, soft and round and well-balanced, its clash of aromas deepened into a bouquet. The magic happens over time, and like a marriage, it has to be protected—from too much heat and noise, too wild a change in temperature, too many vibrations.
Underfoot
Spiral Cellars
Any dog knows: If you want to protect treasure, you bury it. But what if you don’t have a basement? In 1978, a Frenchman (but of course) invented the spiral wine cellar (see image above), a precast cylindrical system that’s sunk into the ground. It’s watertight, and because it’s designed for optimum airflow and buried in earth, it requires no energy to maintain a constant temperature. You descend from a trapdoor—glass, for intrigue, or wood, to conceal it—in the floor of your kitchen, study, or dining room. Then you make your selection from as many as 1,900 perfectly stored bottles. See spiralcellars.co.uk for more information.
Bowing to Bacchus
T. Rohan Interiors
If you choose the right chair in the lower level’s banquet room, you can glance over at the glass-enclosed wine cellar whenever the conversation drifts. At the start of each course, your host will rise and enter the glass door. Follow him. To your left, you’ll see a life-size (well, full-scale) statue of Bacchus, whom designer Tim Rohan calls “the god of festive behavior.” Straight ahead lies a long hallway, softly lit by triangular sconces, the glow aimed upward at a cross-vault ceiling. On each side of the hall are three deep arches, built of pink granite cobblestones from the riverfront. At the end, a seventh arch frames a French cabinet from the early 19th century. Its raised door panels were replaced with hand-beveled glass a century ago, and its interior is upholstered in linen to protect stemware. You head toward it on the taupe-rose marble floor, an Oriental runner softening your steps. Your host pauses at each archway, pointing through to a niche with three walls of shelving, with room for bottles, magnums, and unpacked cases, and a marble ledge where he rests his selections.
Sideways
The Magnum Company
John Seitz, founder of The Magnum Company (magnumcellars.net), travels the country in his RV, one week putting in a sizable wine cellar for Regis Philbin, the next week driving home to create an even bigger one for Ruth’s Chris Steak House at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at The Arch. One of his redwood cellars is in Chicago and connects two curved rooms, “which was quite a challenge,” Seitz says. “The cabinet with the water controls had to be custom-built on the job site.” A waterfall in the center makes the 2,800-bottle cellar feel bigger and airier, and the quarter-round shelf neatly completes the racking.
Another cellar Seitz designed, this one on Long Island, N.Y., has a glass front and the high-reveal display rack has lighting beneath each shelf, to give a glow to the bottles below. Seitz had a background mural painted and installed diamond bins, with a small waterfall rack above. An antique table and charms add character: Seitz found them at an old farm in upstate New York.
Ode to the Chateau
Lorrien Homes
A couple in Town & Country had more than a thousand bottles of wine stored in a corner of their unfinished basement. It wouldn’t do. They called Dana Dunbar, owner and president of Lorrien Homes, who’d done the demolition and rebuilding of their house three years earlier, and told him they wanted an old-world cellar that incorporated elements from their home, yet suggested a chateau in the Rhône Valley. The first thing he remembered was the arch-top, leaded-glass exterior door that he’d hidden away in their basement because he couldn’t bear to get rid of it. The door experts at The Scobis Company routed the bottom and added a mechanical drop-down seal, then refinished the door to smooth its spotty distress into beauty. Dunbar echoed the hammered copper in other parts of the house in a backsplash for the wine-tasting bar. He had racks made for individual bottles, display bottles, multiple bottles, and full cases, all in Sapele, a figured African mahogany that withstands high humidity and doesn’t give off a scent that will confound the wines’ aromas. “And oh my gosh, it’s beautiful,” Dunbar says. He tucked the racks under soffits created by a high tray ceiling in the room’s center, and he painted the walls and the deeply recessed toe kicks in midnight black, so the racks look as though they’re floating. Stone columns stand between the racks, and a stone valance arches over the wine-tasting bar. Old World, new pleasure.
