Local wine guru Matt Tebbetts shares tips on setting up and stocking your wine cellar
Matt Tebbetts has been a baseball player and a banker, but his true passion lies in wine. It was his wife Carly’s cancer diagnosis in 2011 that led the couple to reevaluate their careers. For Matt, that meant retreating from the finance world and starting a wine distribution company in Greenville. Now eight years old, Mission Grape, the Upstate’s only local wine distributor, focuses on small family farms and organic and biodynamic producers in the US and Europe. What’s important to the founder and his team is the story and history behind each producer and how they grow and produce their wine with limited intervention.
Whether you’re constructing a showcase cellar or storing wine on shelves in a closet, Tebbetts uncorks the following pointers for collecting wine.
Home Wine Cellar Tips
Budget
This is the first factor to consider when starting a wine cellar. It’s not about the price of the wine, it’s about the love of the wine, Tebbetts says.
Temperature and Humidity
What’s important for storing wine is consistent cool temperatures and relatively high humidity. The ideal temperature for aging wines is between 50–60°F. You want the humidity in the space to be between 60–70% so the corks don’t dry out and allow more oxygen into the wine. If you have one, basements are good options for storing wine (or you can put a small humidifier in a closet).
Light
Store bottles away from sunlight, which can age wines prematurely. When building a cellar, be sure you position bottles so they’re not near electric lights, the heat from which can break down the wine.
What to Buy
Start with what you like. As you continue to learn about wine, you’ll start to add other varietals. “If you love a wine and you have the budget, buy two bottles: one to drink now and one to save,” Tebbetts advises.
Make single varietal wines (i.e., chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir) your base. If you find a winemaker you like whose single varietals are too expensive, look for blends from that grower that are less pricey. If you like bubbles, Cava and Penedès from Spain are great sparkling wines for a fraction of the price of Champagne.
Pro Tips
Cellar what you love and push yourself to try varietals you would not normally drink.
Save wine for special occasions. Some of the best wines to cellar are wedding and anniversary wines, birthday wines, and graduation wines. Years that are important to you and have good vintages are ideal opportunities to put away wines for that special occasion.
The beauty of saving wine is in opening up a prized bottle with friends, Tebbetts says. “Being able to share those stories—why someone collected that wine and understanding what that bottle means to them—is something that no one can put a price on.”
Follow Mission Grape on Instagram at @missiongrapeco.
