For Islanders like you who’ve graduated to accumulating wine by the case, the time may have come to consider cellaring your loot.
If you can’t imagine stowing your bottle bounty in anything but an actual cellar, so be it. In July your correspondent was inadvertently locked in, and therefore had ample opportunity to examine a bona fide, lavishly-stocked Edgartown wine cellar while interviewing award-winning executive chef Justin Melnick at the Terrace restaurant. Since Chef Melnick’s cell phone signal couldn’t penetrate the cellar to reach help upstairs, we were afforded ample time to talk about the chamber’s construction.
“The building of the wine cellar was pretty remarkable to witness,” said Chef Melnick. “Gery Conover [owner of the Charlotte Inn & Terrace Restaurant] has such a great vision for projects like this expansion, and gets results quickly.” He expanded on the process in a later conversation. “As I mentioned when we were locked in the wine cellar [lest readers think I exaggerated], it was all dug out by hand and transported out one bucket at a time through a small window leading to the back of the inn.”
Max Barbosa, who works at The Charlotte Inn, led the labor force with a helper and had the entire cellar dug out in just over a week, Chef Melnick said. After that, the concrete was poured, and the shelves were custom made by Dave Root who does a lot of the carpentry work for the inn. “This was a good winter project,” Chef Melnick continued, “when there is otherwise not much else happening. The attention to detail in the wine cellar is in line with the rest of the inn. All the copper pipes are glistening, everything was painted, light fixtures installed, the ‘stage is set’ as Gery often says around the property. Then it was my turn to fill it with wine, organize the locations of everything, and get it to a point where it is streamlined for easy access during service. Each bin has a number plate that Gery installed once I had an outline for how we were going to be setting it up.”
Done in a sort of an Edwardian style, the cellar has a regality you just wouldn’t expect from what is essentially a specialized storage room. As time wore on during our stay there however, the handsomeness of the surroundings gave way to crackpot ideas: maybe we could drink our way out? Eventually, after rapping on some pipes and then positioning his cell phone against one so it acted like a booster antenna, Chef Melnick reached somebody upstairs and we escaped without having to use the Remy XO as a battering ram.
The design moral? Like walk-in coolers and even, say, automobile trunks, wine cellars should have an exit failsafe. Remember that when you get the desire to go big and subterranean.
Cellar beware
If you’re unable to bankroll a stone-by-stone castle transfer from Europe to house your own subterranean bottle hoard or you haven’t inherited something with catacombs, you’re not out of luck. Without the need for so much as a crawlspace, safe storage for your liquid loved ones can be achieved above ground, sans masonry, for a relatively modest investment and with less risk of being trapped underground. A simple household closet, for example, can be transformed into a proper wine room, albeit a little one, with a short list of supplies and building materials and a solid understanding of what type of defenses you’ll be setting up for your wine’s wellbeing. Those defenses are as follows:
1. Blocking the sun: Sunlight is the bane of wine. Consider all your bottles (red or white) to be so fair skinned they’re practically albinos — with exposure akin to climbing into a skillet with bacon and eggs. Just because your wine comes in colored glass (as a minor hedge against sun damage) that’s not an invitation to display bottles where sunrays can reach them. Curb the urge to install a glass door on your budding wine closet. Your wine wants to hide in the dark like a mushroom. Let it. If you have more than one closet in your house, choose one that’s not adjacent to a window so opening it in the daytime doesn’t cause intermittent solar damage. You’ll of course need illumination in your wine closet but avoid mounting fluorescents. They can emit ultraviolet light that over time may degrade your wine.
2. Maintaining temperature: Wine likes it cool and steady. When wine gets too hot or too cold, its flavor and longevity are gutted. Fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature wine is most content at. Anywhere between 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit is acceptable, however. You will need R19 insulation (at a minimum) throughout your wine closet to be able to keep temperatures in that range. Rigid insulation is easier to cut and sandwich. Though some homes may sustain these temperatures through beefy insulation alone, it is more likely that a small cooling unit (widely available online from companies such as Breezaire and CellarPro) will be necessary. Try not to choose a closet space adjacent to a refrigerator, dishwasher, or dryer, as those appliances are heat emitters. Definitely avoid choosing a closet space adjacent to a furnace. Be conscious of hot water pipes, or occasionally in old houses, steam pipes, running inside walls. Extra insulation may be required to offset the heat these can generate. Be wary of light fixtures that burn hotly.
3. Keeping moisture: Though horizontal storage is the customary method of keeping corks moist, uniform humidity augments that method and keeps corks extra happy. Wine with screw caps or artificial corks are not subject to threats from dryness but wine sealed with genuine cork risks cork-shrinkage, and the damaging oxygen intake that can occur as a result of such shrinkage. Fifty percent to eighty percent humidity is the accepted range for wine storage with seventy percent being the sweet spot. If shelling out for a humidifier seems too much, a bowl of water may suffice. However, humidity can’t be decently retained without a vapor barrier (likely polyethylene sheeting) lain over the insulation. If you store wine by the case, store the case upside down so the corks remain steeped.
4. Nixing agitation: Though the effects are different, shaking a bottle of wine is like shaking a bottle of Coca Cola in that you likely won’t enjoy the results upon opening. Safe to say you’d have to be pretty angry to shake a bottle of wine, unless it’s champagne and in that case you’d be just plain reckless. You can, however, be of otherwise sound mind and neglect to situate your wine away from sources of vibration such as some of the aforementioned appliances. Railroads not being extant on the Vineyard, exterior sources of chronic vibration are uncommon. However, if you suffer from one, shaking champagne and aiming the cork at the problem may prove therapeutic. Suffice it to say, wine, especially maturing wine, thrives on stillness.
Assembling the materials to realize your wine closet will take time and care and most assuredly, additional research but knowing how badly you want one, you’re going to make it happen. If for some reason you find you can’t muster the skills necessary to execute the wine closet of your dreams, an actionable backup plan is available. Standalone units can be bought from a wide variety of manufacturers and simply inserted in the designated closet with little more than a plug needed. Contrary to the preceding warning, you’ll need to accept that these units almost always sport glass doors. A sun-tight outer door is then a prerequisite.
You can manage that.
Lobster trap or not, Chef Melnick’s wine cellar aids him in holding some of the best wine events on Martha’s Vineyard. The next one features Lorenzo Savona on September 19 and 20 – well worth attending; theterracemv.com. Chef Melnick is also one of the featured chefs in the Martha’s Vineyard Food and Wine Festival on October 16-19. For more information, visit: mvfoodandwine.com.