03
February
Thibaut Ferrand — Chef sommelier
Base — 205 cm
Summit — −7 °C
03
February
Base — 205 cm
Summit — −7 °C
The cellar is cut into the rock behind the house and has no heating, no cooling and no ventilation beyond a single shaft that comes out under the north terrace. In summer it sits at eleven degrees. In an ordinary winter it holds nine. Last night it read minus four.
This is a problem, and an interesting one. Wine does not freeze at minus four — the alcohol sees to that — but it comes close enough that the liquid contracts, and a contracting liquid pulls air past the cork. Do that repeatedly over a winter and a bottle that should have another twenty years in it will be tired in five.
The cause turned out to be a shutter on the ventilation shaft that had been propped open in September to clear a smell and never closed. Nobody remembered doing it. The shutter has been closed, and by this evening the cellar was back to two degrees and climbing slowly.
Twelve hundred bottles were exposed. We have moved the oldest — the Rousseau, the Jayer, the four bottles of Ch’teau-Chalon from 1979 that came with the house — to the inner room, which never moved below three, and we will open one of the ordinary bottles every month for a year to see whether anything has changed.
Probably nothing has. But you do not find that out for a decade, which is the whole difficulty of keeping wine.
Elsewhere in the log
Twelve entries so far. The season decides how many more.
Everything the house wrote down this winter, in the order it happened. Turn the spiral to look through them, or take the next entry below.
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