The Inspired Intermedia digital book collection
Issue link: https://inspired.uberflip.com/i/294492
11 "Wine cellar" trips off the tongue so naturally that you might think wine's natural home is underground. It is certainly its ideal home, quiet, dark and cool—but very little of the world's wine has the privilege of such perfect storage. In the old wine world of Europe, Bordeaux, where standards are set for the world, has few cellars. In Burgundy, most are small and domestic. Only Champagne has caves, vast caverns and labyrinthine tunnels—and that only by the happy chance that Romans quarried them for stone 2,000 years ago. What other caves have been co-opted for aging wine? There are troglodyte caverns along the Loire, more Roman quarries in Trier on the Mosel and cliff-perched cellars with alarming sea views on Santorini in the Aegean, but you have to go to California to see the idea carried into perfection with all the energy and skill of modern engineering. It started in the 19th century with Chinese labor. I have particularly fond memories of the coolie- cut Schramsberg caves where Molly Chappellet once planned the surprise party of a lifetime for my birthday. Imagine being deep in the earth with a flickering lantern, when suddenly lights come on to reveal a flowering garden. That is what Molly created: a rare trellis, a little lawn, and my desk with its photos and papers transported to the bowels of the earth. There is clearly something about caves that spurs creativity—and that marriage of talent, wine and holes in the rock has taken off in Napa Valley as nowhere else on earth. The Channel Tunnel from England to France was dug in the 1980s. When it was finished they parked one of the two immense boring machines by the Dover Road with a sign: For Sale, One Careful Owner. Little did I think it would duly arrive in California with a mission to continue what the coolies started and create the most extensive and spectacular caves ever purpose-made for perfecting wine. Perhaps this remarkable book only represents the beginning. Perhaps with the constraints of climate change and building restrictions we are going to see other industries, or parts of them, transferred to subterranean seclusion. If this is so, cave-cutting has had an astonishingly creative start. Hugh Johnson Foreword