[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.