Sip Quips

After a wonderful trip visiting my folks, I returned to a beautiful brand new home for my wine. While I was gone my wonderful husband was hard at work converting our dreary cellar into a custom wine cellar. Now I’m beginning to understand his fascination with Norm Abram, or even if I don’t understand it, I certainly appreciate the what he has done with his woodworking knowledge. 

We’ve been storing our wine in the crawl space under our house since we moved up here. We’re fortunate, in that we live on a ridiculously steep hillside (50 plus degrees), so while the crawl space is only 18 inches on the upslope side it’s easily 6 feet on downslope side, where we now have storage for over 500 bottles. So now rather than using moldy cardboard boxes (which smell way too much like corked wine for my tastes) we have an amazing cellar. Thanks love!!

The most fun part was getting to go through all of our wine, remembering where we got some of the bottles, rediscovering some bottles I’d completely forgotten about, and organize the bottles so I have a better idea of what we have. It’s only about half full right now, so I have plenty of room to grow, and we have enough room to stash our next round of home wine, which we have yet to bottle – our little girl’s birth got us a little behind schedule, but we’ll get it done soon. .

I think that it is a good practice for everyone with wine to ‘clean out the cellar’ occasionally, whether you have four bottles or four hundred, bottles can easily get put aside and forgotten. Going through your wines lets you rediscover lost treasures and relive the stories that go along with each bottle – you know the one you got as a congratulations from your coworkers, the one that you got at that cute little winery, or that one you scored on clearance – 75% off – how could you say no? You not only get to relive the story, but you create new stories when you open bottles that you are excited to try. Some moms get jewelry as a ‘push present,’ but I’ll take a brand new, custom, wine cellar over a necklace any day. I’ve got the best husband!