BusinessTN

Paring fois gras with a vintage Bordeaux may be commonplace in four-star restaurants, but in upper East Tennessee, the occasion of opening a nice bottle of wine is sometimes saved for barbequed ribs and UT football on the big-screen. In the last five years, Mel Bowman, general manager of Johnson City’s One Stop Discount Wines and Liquors, says that with better global wine distribution and a surge of newer wineries producing affordable, quality wines, more customers are looking to try what’s new, exciting or different. As a result, eyes and palate have shifted from table wines to collectible vintages that need a bit more time to mature. The gift of a Chateau Margaux that won’t mature for another twenty years is certainly a great present, but what exactly does one do with the bottle that can’t be drunk for two decades? Place the bottle on a countertop like some precious ornament, and you’ve just committed the wine to a slow, value-depreciating death. No, collectible wines are like any other investments—in order for them to mature to their full potential, they need the proper care.

Wine racks that can sit on the kitchen counter are fine for wines to be opened in the immediate future. But Evan Baugh of Lipman Brothers, a liquor distribution company, cautions that people make the mistake of setting those decorative wine racks too close to heat-emanating kitchen appliances. “You need to know that wine is affected by heat and light,” Baugh says. For the maturing wines, he recommends purchasing a refrigerated wine cellar. A Cuisinart 11-bottle wine cellar, for instance, has an adjustable electronic thermostat, a tinted-glass door that protects the wines from sunlight, and it also is designed to fit on the kitchen countertop ($179; www.williams-sonoma.com). Though it may seem a pricey way to store what amounts to grape juice bottles, “the [wine cellar] should pay for itself for what you get,” Baugh says.

Many keep just enough bottles to suffice for a month or so, but for those who pick up cases of wine with each trip to Willamette Valley, Paso Robles or even the local wine store, more than cardboard boxes may be needed. If remodeling a basement is in your spring plans, why not consider building a museum—a wine museum, that is. The design team at Cellar Solutions, a custom wine cellar maker in Germantown, will help you realize your ultimate dream cellar, fitting of your budget and bottle quantity (www.winehome.com). The result is like a gallery, and each bottle comes fitted with its own museum plaque. That 2003 Chateau d’Yquem, Sauternes, now has storage fitting of its caliber.

Most of the wines we drink on a regular basis are usually consumed before we can say “where should I store it?” But some wines truly are treasures that must grow old together with us. It’s only fair to give them the care that they deserve, care commensurate to that bestowed by the winemakers in getting the wine from grape to bottle in the first place.