You could make a case that there are really only two types of wine drinkers: Those who cellar wines and those who don’t. The latter group is, of course, far larger than the former.

I remember, as a poor newcomer to wine, how preposterous it seemed that I would ever have enough wine – really, enough money – to actually have more wine on hand than I could drink in, say, a week. A wine cellar is, after all, a collection of uncashed paychecks.

But, amazingly, I discovered that with a bit of scrimping and a lot of passion, those bottles began to pile up. I began to buy for the future. Hallelujah! I had more wine than I could drink in a week. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, it very likely will.

Which is why I’d like to take you aside and tell you an uncomfortable truth: Don’t bother saving wine unless you’re prepared to store it properly. You’ll be setting yourself up for heartbreak – and wasting your money. (It’s up to you to decide which is worse.)

I mention this because we’re now approaching what might be called the silly season of wine cellaring. After nearly 30 years of wine writing, I’ve lost count of the number of well-meaning wine articles I’ve read trying to reassure readers that, as warm weather approaches, their wines are all right. Don’t worry, a closet is almost as good as a cellar.

When I’ve asked my colleagues why they write such nonsense – and they know it’s nonsense – they say, “Look, most folks are going to polish off their wines long before the heat does. We need to make wine less forbidding, less pretentious. So what if they’re storing it in a closet? It’s better than not having any wine at all, right?”

Now these arguments do have some merit. If you’re using your closet simply as a kind of wine way station, where it reposes for a just few months at most before journeying down your gullet, then by all means rest easy. It’s just a depot.

However, if you’ve bought wine with the intention of seeing how it will change – and, you hope, improve – in a year or two, then this advice is pernicious. To prove the point, let me tell you about Svante August Arrhenius, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1903. He’s got the skinny on why your (warm) closet won’t do over the not-so-long haul.

Arrhenius is famous among chemists for what’s come to be called the “Arrhenius equation”: For every increase of 18 degrees Fahrenheit you should double the rate of the average chemical reaction. The same holds true in reverse: The colder, the less the rate of reaction. Technically, the coefficient of this rate of increase is between 1.5 and 3, but the rule of thumb is to double the reaction rate, whether it’s an increase or a decrease.

Now, to a chemist, wine is just another solution, subject to a bunch of reactions. So a wine stored at 73 degrees will age twice as fast as it will at 55 degrees, using the Arrhenius equation.

Cold slows down the rate of chemical reactions. This is why we hear about these miraculously preserved wines from frigid Scottish cellars. Those bottles are in a state of quasi-suspended animation, the chemical reactions slowed to a crawl by the unrelenting cold of those stone cellars. Cold has no damaging effect on wine until it freezes, which occurs at about 27 degrees Fahrenheit.

Some wines are not as responsive to heat as others. White wines, for example, are more heat-sensitive than reds. The reason is tannins, which bind up the oxygen molecules, preventing them from reacting to heat. That, in turn, reduces oxidation. Since they’re rarely fermented with their skins, white wines have few tannins.

In comparison, red wines are always fermented with their skins, as the skins have the color. Some varieties are intrinsically more tannic, such as cabernet sauvignon or syrah. Others, such as pinot noir, have comparatively little. No prizes for guessing which is the tougher customer.

And what about all those other cellaring bugaboos such as humidity and vibration? Here, for once, I’m with the “rest easy” crowd. Professor Vernon Singleton of the University of California at Davis’s Department of Viticulture and Enology has proved that the old lore about vibration being harmful is a myth. A series of tests performed by Mr. Singleton revealed that vibration had no effect on wine, even over relatively long periods.

When I interviewed Mr. Singleton some years ago on this subject, he said flatly, “The only bad feature about vibration is possibly in dispersing sediments. You may, if you disperse them hard enough and often enough, find that it produces such fine particles that it fails to settle. So it may affect clarity, which in turn can affect flavor. But barring that, I can say that vibration doesn’t make a difference. If you can look at a bottle of wine and it’s still clear, then it wasn’t vibrated enough to make a difference.”

And what about humidity? This is a vexed subject. Virtually every book about wine cellaring tells you that a proper cellar should have 60% or 70% humidity or even higher. This came from the days when wine was held in wood barrels.

Before the advent of estate-bottling of wines little more than 70 years ago, it was common for wine to be shipped and held in wooden barrels or casks in restaurants and even in private homes. Consumers bottled their own wines when they saw fit. Moreover, it was common in the 1800s and the early part of the 1900s for a wine to be aged in wood intentionally for four or six years before being bottled.

Wood, unlike glass, is porous. About 10% of the contents of a barrel is lost through evaporation every year even in a humid cellar, which is a compelling fact to a winery holding hundreds of thousands of gallons of wine in barrel. In such a circumstance you definitely want high humidity.

But what does that have to do with wine stored in a glass bottle near-hermetically sealed by a cork? Nothing. Humidity defenders point to keeping the cork moist. This is lame. After all, the cork is kept downright wet by the wine if stored sideways and, for that matter, by the 100% humidity inside the bottle if stored upright. In short, the business about humidity is an unthinking carryover from the past.

The only thing that matters is temperature. If you love your wines – and want to keep them for more than daily drinking – then you can’t be too cool. That means a steady temperature of around 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

That, by the way, means your air conditioner won’t do the trick, as it cools as much by dehumidification as by actually lowering temperature. Air conditioners cool only to about 65 degrees, which is 10 degrees higher than is ideal.

The answer is either one of those special home wine-storage units or a temperature-controlled storage locker at one of the city’s serious wine-storage facilities. Either may seem expensive at first glance, but believe me, it’s cheap compared to the remorse you’ll feel upon opening that special bottle only to discover that it long ago said “adieu.”

Wine Storage Options

Acker, Merrall & Condit/LLK Wine Storage
973-227-1753 www.ackerwines.com/storage.cfm

Brix Wine Vault
718-643-9099 www.brixwinevault.com

Chelsea Wine Vault
212-462-4244 www.chelseawinevault.com

Horse Ridge Cellars
860-763-5380 www.horseridgecellars.com

Morrell & Company Vintage Wine Warehouse
212-245-4889 Ext. 1 www.morrellwine.com

The Wine Cellarage
718-858-6885 www.winecellarage.com