[wgj]

It looks like no one has said this yet. Many of the higher price/quality wines are expected to be cellared for a certain number of years after release. Opened too soon, they will have too much tannin and/or acidity. It costs money to keep wines under the correct conditions. One thing that drives up the price of a bottle is whether someone else already did this for you. A 2014 Bordeaux right now, on average, will cost a lot more than a 2020 of the same wine.

[antognini]

Yes that's another factor. For the cheaper wines (pretty much anything you can get in a grocery store), they're made to be opened immediately and don't really benefit from aging. But the higher end wines need to be aged.

One of the fun things is that you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage. So there are online forums where people will buy a case and open one bottle a year and report their results on how the quality changes over time.

[poulsbohemian]

>you don't really know exactly the optimum amount of time to cellar a new vintage.

This is a hidden benefit of belonging to a wine club. Often you can talk to the wine maker and/or they are opening enough bottles regularly that they can give you a sense of when it's time to drink. After you've been through a few years of the syrah or the cab sav, you get a sense for yourself too because you start to get the pulse of what the winemaker is making.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I occasionally make wine as a hobby.

This is actually the first year in a long time that I have a batch aging -- using wild grapes growing on my property. The first wine I ever made (from a kit), unbeknownst to me, needed to be aged to taste good. Once I learned that, I did the same test: every few months I'd open a bottle and taste it. After a year, most of the "tarry" flavors were gone, after 3 it was getting good. At five I really liked it. Unfortunately, no bottles survived to the 10-year mark, but I did learn to make wines that matured a lot faster!

[xyzzyz]

It does not cost nearly as much as the price premium.

A regular household fridge costs something like $100/year to run. My fridge has 20 cubic feet of volume, which is something like 500 liters. This suggests we can fit at least 100 bottles into it. This gives us $1/year as upper bound for storage costs per bottle. This is upper bound, because air conditioning costs go down with volume, due to square-cube law.

Point is, if the price premium was driven mostly by storage costs, it would be significantly lower than it actually is.

[nephanth]

Small remark though, you shouldn’t age wine in a fridge (the humidity is too high, and temperature too low).

There are some fridge-like "wine cellar" contraptions that work well (keep optimal air quality / temperature).

Or a basement does the trick if the humidity is right (needs to be high but not too high)

I remember when I was a kid, my parents had a room in the basement for storing wine that was entirely airtight, with an AC-like device that controlled the air. That’s probably extremely overkill if you aren’t a wine buff (& storing huge quantities of it) though

[neilc]

You also need to factor in the time value of money: if the winemaker sells you a 2022 release in 2022, they get paid immediately.

Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do), insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on. If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.

[xyzzyz]

> You also need to factor in the time value of money: if the winemaker sells you a 2022 release in 2022, they get paid immediately.

This is right, I forgot about this: at 5% interest rates, 5 years of storage is actually 25% of the original price, which is probably substantial factor.

> Also factor in temperature and humidity controlled storage (a kitchen fridge will not do),

My kitchen fridge example was only meant to provide an estimate for the cost. Controlling humidity upwards is not expensive at all, it’s even cheaper in fact than controlling temperature.

> insurance against disasters, backup power generation, and so on.

These are extremely cheap at scale. You don’t really need backup power generation, the wine won’t spoil from few hours or even days of inappropriate temperature.

> If you think aged wines are overpriced, it is easy to cut out the middleman and age it yourself — so my guess is that the market is reasonably efficient.

My point was rather that the mere cost of storage is not the main part of the premium. Capital cost is probably significantly higher, but what is probably even higher still is speculation premium: not all wine vintages are appreciating equally, and if you just buy random wines, they will likely won’t appreciate all equally over time.

[Serishmus]

Yes, but then you are doing a bunch of work — buying a (second?) fridge, paying to rent or own space to put it, making sure the fridge continues to run, making sure you don’t accidentally drink your wine before you meant to. If I cared about this property I would certainly pay someone much more than the cost of storage in electricity terms to not have to do any of that or wait a number of years to get a rolling stock going.

[randomcarbloke]

>It does not cost nearly as much as the price premium

for industrial climate control on wines? if you remove the improved drinkability that comes with age, and the scarcity and desireability of well-known chateaux it absolutely does.

There are companies that specialise in storing wine portfolios and you'd be amazed at how much they charge, wine in bottles takes up a lot of room and is really heavy.

[SanjayMehta]

What happens if I buy a 2022 wine today and store it for 5 years? Will it be the same as buying the same vintage in 2027 from the wine seller?

I guess what I'm asking is if there's some special storage requirements which can't be met at home?

[wgj]

You can cellar your own wine. Lots of people do it, but cellar conditions matter and it's an expensive hobby. It's nice to not need to know five years in advance what you will feel like drinking tonight. Optionality is worth something.

But yes, with care a hobbyist can do better than how some retail wine is kept.

Edit: The main points are 1) cool (~55F/13C), 2) dark, 3) not too dry (70% humidity is usually recommended. This is to protect the cork), and 4) store on its side, also to protect the cork from drying out. Five years is a long time.

Most retail wines are made to drink now though. If it's on the shelf it's ready.

[gerdesj]

Not all wines are the same! Some can benefit from aging but not all.

The whole idea of "sealing" wine in a bottle is to keep it and not actually change it. It's a preservation method. However, the bottle is not really completely sealed and the small air gap at the top is not empty either. The cork might allow a tiny amount of air transfer too. The remains of the wine creation process might also leave some reactive components.

When you store wine it seems that a cellar type environment with its stale and earthy air helps - hmmm I wonder why!

Challenge your tastes or whatevs. For example you might find that a really cheap bottle of white chilled to about 5C and fizzed in a Soda Stream makes quite a decent Champagne analogue.

[heelix]

Haha. Rewinding back to my university days, I had picked up what I thought was a very nice bottle of Beaujolais. I put it above my fridge... and fast forward, opened it with my Bride of 20 years. Pure vinegar. I suspect that bottle had just about everything wrong done to it storage wise, outside of freezing solid.

[dejv]

There are very few wines that could be aged , most commercial bottles are good for 1 to 3 years bo matter how well you store them. Even wines from respectable producers are often going to start being broken in 10 years or so. Wine is living thing and the biological and biochemical processes are going to ruin the liquid at some point. Wines that could survive 20, 30 or more years are exception not rule and you need to know which one to pick.

[akho]

Also, Beaujolais.

[Retric]

Depends on what your location and budget is. Storing wine outside or at room temperature doesn’t age it the same way a wine cellar in France would. In general you want ~53-57 Fahrenheit and 50-80% humidity depending on what exactly you want to happen.

Unfortunately, simply digging a hole in your back yard only gets it to the average temperature of your area which may be quite different to that hypothetical wine cellar in France.

In the end keeping even a fairly large room at whatever temperature and humidity level you desire isn’t that difficult, assuming you have the space and budget.

[janitor_monkey]

If you store it in the shelf it will become vinegar.