Most readers of this blog would agree that, broadly speaking, in life you get what you pay for. Of course, there are occasions when you might be surprised by a genuine bargain, but as a rule of thumb, paying two-star rates and expecting five-star service is the definition either of incurable optimism or extreme naivety.
Obviously, there are times when a bit of judicious corner-cutting does no harm. But wine storage is not one of them. And if you have a collection which is very valuable, very prestigious, requires lengthy ageing (or, indeed, all three) this is an area that should absolutely not be skimped on.
Not that people don’t try – even people who should, frankly, know better.
‘One of the problems we have is that we’re often compared at a cost level, not by what we offer as a service,’ says Octavian’s managing director, Vincent O’Brien.
Cynics might suggest that there’s nothing terribly complicated about storage – you just need somewhere cool and dark and if that saves you a couple of hundred pounds a year, then where’s the problem?
This would, however, be a gross over-simplification (for which the cynics should be thoroughly ashamed!) and also overlooks a number of absolutely crucial points.
For starters, let’s take the whole safeguarding issue. Octavian is a vast former stone mine, accessible by only three entrances, and 156 stairs. Everyone is searched on the way in and out. It could feature as the setting for an apparently impossible theft in a Tom Cruise film.
‘A lot of our larger private customers aren’t really paying for storage,’ muses O’Brien. ‘They’re paying for insurance because they wouldn’t be able to get the level of insurance that we’re covering at home themselves.’
Currently, some insurers are capping wine in domestic homes at a maximum value of £10,000 which, in the context of fine wine collectors and investors alike, is not very much. Octavian, by contrast, covers up to £450m.
Of course, if you do have a high-value collection, you probably don’t want to be taking too many chances with it – both from a security/insurance perspective and also from the point of view of product quality.
Fine wine is, for sure, the pinnacle of what the fruit of the vine can be about. The ability of products to capture a moment in time and develop over decades is magical – and almost unique. You might, for instance, buy some fine art as an investment. But it’s not going to look any different ten, 20 or 30 years on.
But for great wine to make that flavour odyssey the conditions have to be absolutely on point.
Masters of Wine Sarah Abbott and Siobhan Turner act as fine wine detectives, assessing and verifying collections – and they have toe-curling stories of expensive bottles being stored upright in non air-conditioned environments or being water-damaged in private cellars.
‘People think storage is all about temperature, but perfect storage conditions are more involved than that,’ says O’Brien. ‘Our cases are stored at 13 degrees Celsius, plus or minus one degree. But crucially, our cellars are also at 80% humidity, plus or minus 5%, and with no UV light or vibration. That stillness, darkness and lack of variation is really important.’
Only when these storage conditions are unimpeachably perfect, in other words, can fine wines hit their true potential – both in terms of flavour development, and resale value. To return to an earlier analogy, five-star wines, deserve five-star accommodation. Period.
So if you’re serious about wine – whether to drink or sell on, a quality environment should be a non-negotiable.