Lucy Hargreaves

British-owned business Spiral Cellars designs, makes and installs a range of luxury wine storage options from free-standing cabinets to bespoke wine rooms. Here, Managing Director Lucy Hargreaves shares her tips on choosing the best storage option, and explains why storing wine has become a greater priority for consumers

1. As an investor, what first attracted you to Spiral Cellars?

I started collecting wine when I was in my early 30s. What started out as an occasional case bought on a whim at a wine fair, soon became a more regular habit. I would go on tips to wineries and would send a few cases of my liquid finds back home. Trouble was, I was buying at a greater rate than I was drinking (despite my best efforts …) . The house was beginning to look like a wine merchants with boxes stacked everywhere, so when the opportunity to invest in Spiral Cellars presented itself, it was a no brainer.

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2. How has the company evolved over the years?

In the beginning, we only sold the one product, our eponymous underground Spiral Cellar, but over the years, the range of products we offer has greatly expanded, so much so that we can now proudly claim to offer the broadest range of luxury wine storage on the market. Our portfolio of cellaring solutions now includes state-of-the-art contemporary glass wine walls, more modest yet still elegant freestanding wine cabinets, bespoke wine rooms and of course, our statement underground cellars. With the range of cellaring solutions we offer, we can create storage to suit a wide range of requirements, personal tastes, budgets and available space.

The expansion of our product portfolio was in response to changing customer needs and expectations. Wine storage used to be an after-thought, with bottles hidden away in the bowels of the house. But then, as more of us started to drink higher quality wines, coupled with the growth of home entertaining, wine storage underwent something of a renaissance. Suddenly, cellaring was no longer just a pragmatic storage solution, it became a highly desirable interior feature.

3. What sets your products apart?

Our products are born out of experience. Over the last 40 years, we have installed more than 4,000 cellars in the UK alone and numerous others around the world. It’s fair to say that this has given us a degree of experience and cellaring know-how that is simply unrivalled within the industry. Our clients can enjoy total peace of mind, confident their wine is safely and securely housed in a Spiral Cellar wine room, cabinet, wall or cellar. And as we all know, you can’t put a value on peace of mind.

The company’s original product the Spiral Cellar offers a stylish and space efficient storage option

4. How important is it for your team to be knowledgeable about wine?

Wine cellaring is actually a very complicated business. It’s not easy to create the exacting environmental conditions required to aid wine maturation. Yes it’s important that our wine cellars, rooms, walls and cabinets look beautiful, but more fundamentally, it’s crucial that they provide the ideal environmental conditions in which to store both ready-to-drink wine and bottles that need longer term cellaring. To help our team appreciate the intricacies of wine cellaring, they need to appreciate wine. That’s why it’s a requirement that everyone in the company takes the WSET Level 1 course, the exception being our design team who must sit Level 2. I passionately believe that our designers build better cellars because they truly understand wine.

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5. What advice would you give to a client considering a cellar installation?

The golden rule is to start with the wine, rather than the space. Take the time to really ask questions of your collection. What size is it currently? Is it likely to grow over time and at what pace? Will you be looking to store larger or unusually shaped bottles in your cellar? What about cases, spirits, stemware etc? Once the storage parameters have been set, it’s then time to think about the form and style the storage will take, and where it will be located within the home. Clients assume that the latter is an obvious decision, but you would be amazed at the number of times we are approached to design storage to suit a particular space, only for it to be positioned elsewhere having visited the client’s property.

6. What’s your favourite wine to drink at home?

I do have some favourites (you can’t go wrong with a decent Zinfandel), but my real love is trying new wines. I’m lucky to have friends in the industry who have introduced me to some absolute gems over the years. I recently had a bottle of Gaja Barbaresco 2008, a case of which was given to me by a grateful client. It’s by no means an everyday wine, but my goodness, it was special.

Find out more: spiralcellars.co.uk

Eurocave’s wine storage cabinets can be built into kitchen interiors, such as this cabinet from the Inspiration range

LUX Editor-in-Chief Darius Sanai shares his experiences of storing and spoiling wine, and explains why Eurocave cabinets offer the optimum storage conditions

Wine is a subject that can engage a vast cast of humans in discussion, from friends wondering what to drink on their terrace in St Tropez next summer that won’t give them a headache, to full-on geek discussions about the grape picking dates in the grand cru vineyards of Gevrey-Chambertin in 2017, via speculation on which wines will be the next to jump in price and provide a payoff for speculators.

But storing wine? I can’t remember the last time I spoke to anyone outside the wine trade about that. You buy it, you store it somewhere not too hot until it’s ready, then you drink it. What’s there to discuss?

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Quite a lot, as it happens, as how you store wine is an essential element not just of ownership, but of the point of the stuff, which is how much you enjoy drinking it. There is an old adage that there is no such thing as a great wine, just a great bottle of a wine, and much of the truth in this emanates from the extreme sensitivity of wine – any wine – to how it is stored. Wine is fermented fruit juice, and some of the finest wines contain minimal amounts of (natural) preservative, so rely almost entirely on a natural process to improve in the bottle, and also not to spoil, like any other foodstuff.

The first rule of buying wine – any wine, whether it’s a case of Domaine de la Romanee Conti, or a bottle over dinner – is provenance, which means being as sure as you can that it has been stored correctly to date. A single morning in a hot warehouse, or lying on a wharf in direct sunlight on an August day in the Mediterranean, is enough to ruin a wine, permanently. Sometimes there may be telltale signs, like the cork pushing out through the capsule, or rivers of dried wine, escaped from the bottle when the liquid expanded as it heated. Often, though, there are no signs, which means you need to trust your consignor, or know you are taking a gamble with your money.

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If provenance is what has happened to a wine until you lay hands on it, storage is what happens to a wine after you buy it. If you happen to live in a country pile with a deep, windowless cellar, or have a professional cellar in your house – congratulations, there’s no need to read on. (But even you have a proper cellar in your main home, you may not have one in every place in which you serve wine.) If not, and you plan on keeping any wine or champagne in your house more than 24 hours, ask yourself if you would store any other perishable foodstuff in a rack by your oven, in a spare room, or in a garage.

Eurocave’s Royale cabinet can store up 122 traditional Bordeaux bottles or up to 50 magnums

My own enlightenment on wine storage came after many years, and many false starts, and thousands of pounds’ worth of spoiled wines, after trying almost every alternative to spending money on the highest quality storage cabinets for wine. Here’s what happened to me and why (actually, I present those two in reverse order for reasons I hope will become evident) – hopefully this will allow you to travel a smoother route to enjoying your wines as they were made to be enjoyed:

1. Heat kills wine.

And so does direct sunlight. Once, I took up a friend’s offer to store my wine collection in his country house basement. What could possibly go wrong in damp, cool England? I was horrified to discover, on paying a social call, that the dark, damp basement I had deposited the wines in during January became a bright, hot basement in July, as its high-level windows caught the summer sun and created a greenhouse effect. The result was a lot of French wine vinegar.

2. Even if it’s dark and never hot, temperature variation kills wine.

After the country house episode, I bit the bullet and bought some wine cabinets. Declining to buy expensive “restaurant” type cabinets, I purchased small, attractive and cheap wine cabinets from a fashionable homeware store. Six months later, every bottle I opened from these cabinets was nasty. Extensive investigation revealed that these cabinets only imposed a temperature ceiling, through cooling – they had no heat facility. They were placed next to a draughty French window at home, which, in winter, when winds came from the east, let in icy air. When the wind changed, the area of the house was the same temperature as the rest of home. A 15 degree variation, often in a single day. More vinegar. (Cold conditions by themselves can also damage wine, as the liquid contracts and the resulting vacuum can suck in oxidising air).

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3. Sunlight kills wine.

Extensive laboratory testing has proven that even a few minutes of direct sunlight can irrevocably damage a wine. That few minutes can be the sun shining onto your meticulously installed home shelving for half an hour a day during a certain month, while you’re at work and unaware. This resulted in some very rank champagnes.

Finally, a few years ago, having spent years making significant investments in wine, only to see a fair amount of that destroyed by the above, I made an investment that changed my wine life. I bought the best specification wine cabinets I could find, and since have housed every bottle I own in them. Eurocave make the fridge-sized cabinets you see in restaurants and hotels.

The Eurocave Tête à Tête wine cabinet stores up to 12 bottles

Eurocave cabinets work because:

a) unlike many other species of wine cabinet, they are made to both cool and warm the air inside them, allowing a constant temperature no matter what happens outside (mine are in a garage) – this is enormously important, per point 2 above, and buying a wine cabinet which can’t do this is like buying a chocolate teapot.

b) they are extremely well insulated. This means that the effect of any outside temperature variations, or a power cut, is minimised. A lot of wine cabinets have a metal wall between inside and outside – metal is an excellent thermal conductor, meaning it is a terrible insulator.

c) they have either solid or UV-tinted doors, meaning no spoilage due to light is possible.

Within the range, there is an enormous amount of choice in terms of size, capacity and function – you can have sliding shelves for individual bottles, or fixed shelves for piles of bottles of cases. They aren’t cheap, but nor are the wines I store in them. So until you buy the country pile, or install a full cellar room (Eurocave do those) in your house, buy one. Your wines, and your future self, will thank you.

Find out more: eurocave.co.uk