The first thing you need to know about putting together a wine cellar is that you don't have to do it the way Barry Fleischman did.
You don't have to have a separate room with extra insulation and a glass door built into your basement during your home's construction, as Mr. Fleischman did. (But it helps.)
You don't have to have a friend who's a cabinetmaker do custom work on your shelves, as Mr. Fleischman did. (But it helps.)
And you don't have to have 4,500 bottles of the finest wines the world has to offer, as Mr. Fleischman does. (But it really helps.)
"I've gotten phenomenal satisfaction and made a lot of friends and there's been a lot of great meals enhanced by wine," says Mr. Fleischman, a highly regarded caterer who owns the Innovative Gourmet.
Mr. Fleischman's 10-by-12-foot wine room in the basement of his Owings Mills townhouse is indeed magnificent, but it is possible to achieve cellar satisfaction with a considerably smaller investment.
In some ways, a wine cellar is a state of mind. It starts with a decision to set aside a cool place in your home for the preservation and storage of wine. A dozen bottles in a bedroom closet is just a wine stash; that same 12 bottles, when moved to a cool corner of the basement, is an embryonic wine cellar.
L With such a move, a wine drinker crosses a Rubicon of sorts.
Relatively few wine drinkers ever reach this point. Retailers estimate that something like 90 percent of the wines they sell are consumed within 48 hours of their purchase.
But serious wine lovers don't just buy for tonight's meal. They start buying young wines with the idea of holding them a few years so they can improve in the bottle.
If you're at this point, it's time to set up a wine cellar.
Now that doesn't mean you have to have an actual cellar. For practical purposes, it can be any cool place in your residence. It could be a spare bedroom that gets extra air-conditioning. For apartment dwellers it can be a stand-alone refrigerated unit that will hold several hundred bottles at a constant 50 degrees to 60 degrees.
How Cool?
Coolness is critical, however. If you have 10,000 bottles of wine in a room that regularly creeps into the high 70s, you don't have a cellar. You have vinegar futures.
Purists will contend that a real wine cellar should be as chilly as the dungeon of a Scottish castle in November. Don't buy it.
