If You Want to Collect Wine but Don’t Have a Cellar . . .

You want to start a wine collection but don’t have a basement or a back yard and you’re using your clothes closet for, of all things, clothes?

Good news: In Orange County it isn’t necessary to have storage space in one’s home to assemble a good-sized collection. There are a handful of wine storage facilities in the county, the best-known of which are Hi Time Cellars in Costa Mesa and Rolf Wine Storage in Newport Beach.

“You’ll find a lot of people have gotten into wine collecting and can’t afford to give up a closet or part of a garage, so they’ll rent a locker with us,” said Michael Brick, the manager of the Rolf facility. “Also, they may fill up their cellars but still want to collect the great wines that are still coming in, like the ’89 Bordeaux. They’ll store the long-term stuff in our lockers.”

The lockers, he said, are housed in a converted and temperature-controlled warehouse. They are simply plywood cupboards that hold from six to 100 cases of wine. The estimated 250 clients of the facility pay between $10 and $11 per case per year for storage.