Hi,

I'm hoping you can help with a storage concern that I haven’t seen addressed in the other storage discussions. My wife and I are grad students (i.e., low-income). We got married in 2004, and I think it would be cool to get a few good bottles of 2004 Bordeaux, to open on anniversaries. I'm thinking a total of 6-9 different bottles, ranging from Léoville las Cases and Cos-d'Estournel to Larcis-Ducasse and Clos du Marquis--even the least expensive of these would be a special wine for us.

I don't know much about drinking windows, but I'm guessing some of these wines will want several years of bottle age, maybe even 5-10 or more.

My problem is I lack a way of maintaining wine-friendly temperature and humidity. For the next year, at least, we'll be living in a place without a cellar. It may well be 4-5 years before we’re settled into a house with a cellar.

Right now at most I can afford a small portable compressor-driven wine cooler, such as the Danby DWC172BL or the Vinotemp 24 G. I've read the other discussions about these types of coolers not working very well (due to temperature fluctuations and vibration), but I want to ask: does a $100-$150 cooler seem so bad that I'd be better off not buying age-worthy wines at all? Does such a cooler seem likely to ruin a nice 2nd growth that sat in it for 5 years or more?

As neither of us are going into particularly lucrative careers, it may be at least five years before we have a more suitable storage option.

Sorry about the lengthy email, but I wanted to explain that getting a few good '04 Bordeaux is really important to me, so I'm trying to assess the level of risk I'd be facing by storing them in an inexpensive cooler. Feel free to use a 10 (or 100, or whatever) point scale to score the apparent risk level!

Thanks!
Dom

I'd just wait, buy the wines from a good retailler and cellar them when you can do it properly. I don't have a crystal ball, but of all the recent Bordeaux vintages, I can't imagine 2004's skyrocketing in price over the next 3-5 years.

PH

I think you're probably right, PH. In a way we were lucky to get married in a quiet Bordeaux year.

Another option could be renting a locker in a wine storage facility. I don't know what options are available close to you, but I would expect that you could find lockers in the 4-5 case range. This avoids the upfront cost of a cabinet / cooler, and the smaller models can have significant vibration issues.

Personally, I'd recommend sticking with PH's reco if the '04 Bordeaux are the only long-term aging wines that you're looking to buy right now. But if other wines start catching your eye (and fit in the budget!), then I'd look at other alternatives instead of the small coolers.

Well, there are *many* age-worthy wines that catch my eye... it's the budget part that's cramping my style. I'd just make an exception for some good '04s from our favorite region. We're currently living in the southeast (Charleston, SC - soon returning to Georgia for a year), which doesn't seem to be the land of plenty as far as Bordeaux go. But hopefully we'll be headed north within a year or so. And if not, there's also online purchasing, I guess -- though GA is not a great state for that as far as I know.

Doh! Georgia, unfortunately, is not the land of plenty for direct wine shipments. I'd recommend that you make some good friends in SC and be prepared to ship and travel to visit them.

I wouldn't be surprised if GA were one of the last states to loosen up on out-of-state direct sales restrictions. As far as I can tell GA laws tend to be quite pro-business and anti-consumer. And sometimes just backwards, as with the ban on Sunday alcohol sales (in Athens, at least).

Hopefully we'll be out of there before we start buying wines for long-term cellaring. Though the relatively reasonable futures prices for '04 Bordeaux are hard to pass up. I'll trust prices won't spike much over the next few years, even for the best of the vintage (excepting the handful of *really* expensive ones that'll be out of range regardless; man, even if I won the lotto tomorrow I can't imagine spending $600-$800 for a 92-94 pt wine... I'm lookin at you, M. Pétrus! but what do I know, maybe it's really that good...).

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