Caring for Wine

Deep in the bowels of a vast, 19th-century warehouse, behind a plain blue door on one of the far West Side’s grittiest industrial blocks,is the ever cool vault of WineCare Storage. It is here that the wine you sip at Per Se (a client) or at home may well have been resting the previous night.WineCare has a capacity of 20,000 cases and a constant, wine-friendly temperature of 55 degrees. The service, which opened this year, stores the good stuff for restaurants, retailers, private collectors, and anyone who wants to both pamper and closely track their inventory of wine. The best part is, it can be delivered with as little as three hours notice.“You might want eight bottles of wine for dinner,” the founder and president of WineCare, Derek Limbocker, said. “If you drink only five bottles, we’ll pick up the remaining three and put them back in storage.”For New Yorkers who love, covet, and collect wine, storage is no small matter. No other city on earth offers so many retail wine-buying options – and so few choices of where to store it (at least for the apartment-dwelling majority). A partial solution, given the space and budget, is one of the many wine refrigeration units available. They are adequate for smaller numbers of bottles awaiting nearterm drinking but not capacious enough for multicase purchases.And that’s where the Ohio-born Mr. Limbocker comes in. He realized this problem back in the mid-1960s, when he owned Gateway Wine & Spirits, an Upper East Side wine shop. “We were direct-importing a private label champagne called Ruinhart-Baron Philippe,” Mr. Limbocker, a career banker and wine buff who was then moonlighting as a retailer, said. “That bubbly was a great buy at $7 per bottle, and people were buying six or seven cases at a time and asking me to store it.”Mr. Limbocker eventually sold his wine shop, but, he said, “the storage problem kept escalating in discussions I had. Nobody had good stories about where they were storing their wine. Often, they’d ask a retailer for their wine only to be told he was having trouble finding it. Or the wine that was delivered was the wrong wine.”Jean-Pierre Galateau, head of sales and marketing for WineCare, has his own litany of stories about wine that has been “lost”in storage facilities. Only a few weeks ago, for example, a case of magnums of Chateau Petrus, Bordeaux’s priciest wine, disappeared from a retailer’s warehouse. “It’s a funny thing,” he said, “but only the best wines go astray.”As Mr. Limbocker pondered the storage problem, he sought a way that people could store wine and feel secure about doing so, but also access it quickly. “When I was a student at Yale that there was a service that took piles of dirty laundry from the dorms and returned it a few days later neatly boxed, even though you’d think the stuff would get mixed up,” he said. “There had to be a similar system for wine.”The solution was in the growth of document storage and retrieval systems enabled by specialized computer software: “I saw that you could massage one of these programs so that instead of having access to millions of pieces of paper, you could zero in on 12 bottles of wine. Then the Internet came along, and bingo!”With the software, consumers could have real-time information about their wine. And the right space for a spacious wine storage company in Manhattan wasn’t hard to find. He’d already been storing his own wine there in the basement of a massive warehouse occupying a full block on the Hudson River waterfront between West 27th and West 28th streets. Boxcars barged over from New Jersey once rolled directly into the warehouse through a massive arched entrance. Currently, the building is said to be the country’s largest mini-storage building.The temperature in his rented storage space naturally ranged between 45 and 65 degrees across the seasons. With eight partners including an owner of the building, he took a long-term lease on 15,000 square feet of cellar space on the north side earlier this year. New, ultra thick insulation was installed in the ceiling as well as two cooling units. Even during the hottest days last summer, only one unit was needed to maintain 55 degrees. “Our Con Edison [bill] was only about half of what we’d projected,” Mr. Limbocker said.He identified six groups as potential customers for WineCare. It included restaurants, wine shops, auction houses, non-residential users such as small importers and cruise ships, private collectors, and potential collectors. The last group is turning out to be the most interesting.“So many people never thought about collecting simply because they had nowhere to put the wine and no way to keep track of it,” Mr. Lembocker said.The base cost of storage is $1.95 per month, with discounts for large lots.The minimum charge is $25 per month, regardless of number of cases stored. Incoming wine is immediately bar coded, insuring that one customer’s Chateau Margaux 1996 is not confused with another customer’s case of the same wine.For those who want to sell their wine, WineCare is a boon: Provenance is key to wine prices at auction. Depending on where wine has been stored, the hammer price can vary dramatically. WineCare plans to offer customers certification that their wine has been on premises and for how long.Another bonus for customers is Mr. Galatreau’s occasional e-mails alerting them to good deals. Last month, for example, he located a New Jersey source for Chateau La Nerthe, a superb Chateauneuf-du-Pape, for $4.50 per bottle less than the lowest price in Manhattan. “In two hours, our customers bought 40 cases. Mr. Galatreau said. “They know we are objective when we recommend a deal. Unlike the retailer, we’re not selling wine – only storing it.”

Caring for Wine

Caring for Wine

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