Beginner Wine Drinker - Buying My First Cabinet

Definitely not next to the oven. I'd even be worried about putting tins of food and dry goods in that cupboard. I know a brand new oven will have better insulation than, e.g. my old one, but that strikes me as bad kitchen design to put food storage right next to the oven.

As has already been mentioned, bottom of wardrobe will work perfectly well for your purposes.
 
Awww, but you want your wines on show surely? :P

I think food should be insulated there fairly well - besides I think it would mainly be used for root vegetables and the like.
 
You would be surprised at how hot that cupboard next to the oven gets. We only use ours for stock cubes, dried pulses pasta etc.

By way of an indication, our holiday home in Burgundy had a lovely shiny new IKEA kitchen fitted, new appliances etc. The oven was installed directly next to the fridge - big mistake. The inside of the fridge door was hot and we had to ratchet the power up in there to avoid our perishables from perishing
 
Emailed the Wine Society, haven't heard back yet.

It is worth considering either The Wine Society (TWS), or another company which will store wine for you long term to avoid you having to do it yourself. I think it's probably hard to beat TWS on price - I think they're currently charging about £8 per dozen bottles per year. Of course, you can only store wines you buy from them while other storage businesses will take cases you buy from anywhere. Also, TWS has restrictions on how you can pull out partial cases (min 12 mixed bottles from up to 4 different cases at a time), whereas specialist storage companies mean you can generally pull out whatever you like. It depends what works for you.

Of course, the big problem with having this sort of unlimited storage is you can end up with a lot more wine than you intended.
 
Surely if all you want is a number of bottles to cover every occasion, with no requirement to age and to be able to display them for a "wow factor" then all you need is a wine rack. Some of the floor standing models look pretty good and prices range from a few pounds for an ebay cheapy, to several thousand pounds for a bespoke one off. I have one on my kitchen counter that was a gift from friends. It holds 9 bottles and is made from solid metal. They bought it in John Lewis' and I can't imagine it was very expensive.
 
It was the Pompey Wine Society I had emailed, not The Wine Society - though I had to double check to make sure I wasn't getting them mixed up at first. The Wine Society website looks decent as does Naked Wines, guess it just comes down to preference.

And yeah I'll make do with a wine rack for now though I may look into those sleeves mentioned before for serving temperature or just refer to the chart found on one of the web links where it shows how long to chill or leave it out prior to serving.
 
- Join the Wine Society. Bypass supermarkets altogether if possible. TWS have a huge range of wines at less than £10 and they are almost guaranteed to be more interesting than anything in your local supermarket. It's a superb way to drink far and wide whilst you work out what you do and don't like.
- As a general rule, double how much you spend on a bottle and drink half as much! I used to spend £6 in the supermarket and drink shite, now I spend £12 from TWS or an independent merchant and frequently drink deliciously :)

On this note, I see a lot of posts where people debate the online sites, Majestic, Naked, TWS etc and compare them to supermarkets (ASDA, Waitrose, Co-Op). I admit most of my wines outside of a restaurant in the past will have come from the Co-Op - although that's mainly because I work in their Southern head office and therefore enjoy raiding their shelves on PayDay weekend when we get 20% off on top of the 15% off for 4 bottles deal! Just grabbed a few today actually!

Now they have their own brands and plenty which say "selected by the Co-Op", but they taste fine to me so far. But I haven't the taste buds yet to register all these differences you refer to in tasting notes - tannins and the like. You can write a whole essay about a glass of wine, I know if it tastes nice in my mouth and doesn't leave a bad aftertaste. If I see a brand that I don't recognise, chances are I assume it's not your everyday cheap-o nasty wine.

Now for the online sites, Naked have the Angels thing and I hear a lot on forums about how that's not as good value as it seems. I look on TWS, the wines sound nice, and it's all brands I've never heard of, but then that's the same on any wine website or hell, in half of a supermarket shelf. Value seems fine across every website with £80-£115 being your typical price for a case, but whether it's Everyday or Premium means nowt to me at this stage - it's no guarantee I'll like the wine.

Bit of a minefield really!
 
On this note, I see a lot of posts where people debate the online sites, Majestic, Naked, TWS etc and compare them to supermarkets (ASDA, Waitrose, Co-Op). I admit most of my wines outside of a restaurant in the past will have come from the Co-Op - although that's mainly because I work in their Southern head office and therefore enjoy raiding their shelves on PayDay weekend when we get 20% off on top of the 15% off for 4 bottles deal! Just grabbed a few today actually!

Now they have their own brands and plenty which say "selected by the Co-Op", but they taste fine to me so far. But I haven't the taste buds yet to register all these differences you refer to in tasting notes - tannins and the like. You can write a whole essay about a glass of wine, I know if it tastes nice in my mouth and doesn't leave a bad aftertaste. If I see a brand that I don't recognise, chances are I assume it's not your everyday cheap-o nasty wine.

Now for the online sites, Naked have the Angels thing and I hear a lot on forums about how that's not as good value as it seems. I look on TWS, the wines sound nice, and it's all brands I've never heard of, but then that's the same on any wine website or hell, in half of a supermarket shelf. Value seems fine across every website with £80-£115 being your typical price for a case, but whether it's Everyday or Premium means nowt to me at this stage - it's no guarantee I'll like the wine.

Bit of a minefield really!

That's the beauty with wine. So many different things to try and learn about. It won't always taste good, but there is nothing better than uncorking something modest and being blown away.
 
Now they have their own brands and plenty which say "selected by the Co-Op", but they taste fine to me so far. But I haven't the taste buds yet to register all these differences you refer to in tasting notes - tannins and the like. You can write a whole essay about a glass of wine, I know if it tastes nice in my mouth and doesn't leave a bad aftertaste. If I see a brand that I don't recognise, chances are I assume it's not your everyday cheap-o nasty wine.

Hi Luke
I'd argue that the ability to write about wine has surprisingly little to do with taste buds, but plenty to do with hitting that point where we decide we want understand our taste buds a bit better. It often starts with writing down simple phrases like "Fruity", "Sharp", "Full" etc. but often followed by a desire to express it more than just a couple of words.

There are some good books on learning how to express what you experience in a wine, my favourite being by Michael Schuster. However for red wines this is quite a useful tool devised by an Aussie (Ric Einstein - aka TORB "The Other Red Bigot" http://www.torbwine.com/images/Torb Tasting Sheet.pdf). It's a multi choice selection and is a cracking way to develop the ability to translate taste into words. After a few months using this, you'll probably feel comfortable enough to ditch the sheet and just write freeform.

... and if you want a semi-educational giggle, then the tour diaries were always a wonderful read, so have a browse of the site to find them. His health problems mean the site is maybe a decade since it was updated, but it's still up there which is good.

regards
Ian
 
whether it's Everyday or Premium means nowt to me at this stage - it's no guarantee I'll like the wine!
Many people start off like that. And after a long journey with wine, some return to a similar conclusion. I would not like to drink basic stuff all the time, but often a cheaper wine hits the spot and I wonder what the fuss is all about with something more expensive. The important thing is to learn about your own taste. Be open minded to what others say, but don't let them talk you into thinking something you don't believe. Sounds obvious, but in practice I find it a difficult tightrope to tread.
 
The Co-Op seems almost the best of the supermarkets for wine, these days.
I would say that a wine awakening involves reading even more than it does tasting, and I don't mean endless tasting notes. Try some of Hugh Johnson's matchless prose.
 
I look on TWS, the wines sound nice, and it's all brands I've never heard of, but then that's the same on any wine website or hell, in half of a supermarket shelf. Value seems fine across every website with £80-£115 being your typical price for a case, but whether it's Everyday or Premium means nowt to me at this stage - it's no guarantee I'll like the wine.

Bit of a minefield really!

You really can buy from TWS with impunity, I think. I've had wines I haven't liked from them, but that's because I haven't liked the style. I don't think I've ever had a badly made wine from there. They're also very good at stocking reasonably priced wines from classic regions that are as representative of the style as you could hope. I'd probably start by getting a bunch of their own-brand bottles in. They have two tiers - "The Society's" and "Exhibition". You could buy one of each from a few classic regions - Bordeaux, Burgundy, Alsace, Rhone, Rioja, Chianti, etc - and do some comparisons. You'd definitely be drinking stuff which was good value and well made.
 
The Co-Op seems almost the best of the supermarkets for wine, these days.
I would say that a wine awakening involves reading even more than it does tasting, and I don't mean endless tasting notes. Try some of Hugh Johnson's matchless prose.
I'd second that. Around my way M&S and the Co-Op are the best by a long way. It tends to vary from region to region though.
 
I've never shopped at the Co-Op, but many people tell me the wine selection is good.

What I would say, is that if you're just starting out, it can be a good idea to 'benchmark' styles by buying from the Wine Society's "Society's Own" selection - they're usually good value, basic wines, but exhibiting a typicity of style that can help you understand what you like, and maybe pick a few styles you'd like to investigate and buy a bit more. You should be able to taste, side-by-side, the difference between a Beaujolais, a Burgundy and a Bordeaux (just for example), and work out where your palate sits and which styles you tend to enjoy more. Then you can find other similarly priced wines either from their range or elsewhere to learn a bit more about the wine, and get a bit more experience.

Certainly, this is how I started, and it gives you a really good benchmark - you can even buy many of the wines in half bottles, which makes it even easier to get a bit of a picture of differences between grapes & regional styles without drinking far too much!

I believe Majestic do a similar offering, as do others, though I've found some of the supermarket own-labels particularly 'ho-hum' - not sure where Co-Op sits on that spectrum, but I've heard good things.
 
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