Ageing wines...

The wine rack under the stairs served me well until I moved to Arizona where there are no basements and cool places to store wine. My collection of wines had increased along with my commitment to preserve them as well as possible. I had to find something suitable and quickly. I was able to locate the supplier of EuroCave, self-contained wine cellars that recreate the natural cooling environment of a chateau wine cellar. I was thrilled with my discovery as was not aware that such things exist and rushed to buy one of their units that could hold about 250 bottles. It was like Christmas when the unit arrived!
I was becoming acutely aware of how little I knew about wines, so I continued to read and educate myself about them. One of the new things I learned was that in addition to preservation, there is wine ageing too. You see, wines do age just like all living things. And this aging produces all kinds of secondary flavors that enhance the taste of wine and make the wine loose its bite.
"Given the vagaries of vinification, much Greek wine will not have lasted long, succumbing either to oxidation...or to spoilage due to inadequate storage, the risk of which was noted by Aristotle". (The Oxford Companion to Wine by Jancis Robinson). Old wine was highly regarded by the Greeks so the process of ageing wines has been practiced since antiquity. The comic poets of ancient Greece had noted that men preferred old wine but young women... I was not about to break this practice.
As I continued my enjoyment of and learning about wine, I realized that having the EuroCave wine cellar was some type of a transformational event for me. What started as a solution to storing and protecting wines from spoilage, evolved into a new science and experience that was destined to become my life's passion.