New CellarSensor Attracts Collectors

This is an updated version of our February 2007 Vintelligence newsletter.

By their very nature, even if they do not readily acknowledge it, wine collectors are control freaks.

That is certainly true when it comes to immersing themselves in wine knowledge by keeping close watch on harvest reports and pending releases, aggressively securing their allocations and absorbing the critics’ latest scores. Anyone who invests in wine is acutely aware, within a few hundred dollars, of the approximate value of their collections. And the projected value.

Collectors make it their business as well to know a lot about custom wine cellar design and climate control technology, and many debate well-researched opinions about optimal storage temperatures among themselves, usually over a fabulous bottle of wine.

But these control freaks very often live in blissful ignorance about what is really going on inside that prized cellar. No matter how deeply their affections run toward all of those top pedigree bottles, let’s face it, a guy only spends but so many hours a week in their presence. Most of the time, the cellar and its inhabitants are on their own.

A mechanical engineer from San Diego has refined a technology, dubbed CellarSensor, that he believes will relieve separation anxiety when business or pleasure takes oenophiles far from home and cellar.

Let’s say your collection is worth $20,000. Do you really prefer not to know that temperature and humidity conditions in the cellar are swinging erratically up and down while you aren’t around? Would you pay about $1,000 up front, and $100 a year thereafter, to see a real-time temperature report even if you are in Singapore and your cellar is in Scottsdale?

“Most collectors walk into a cellar once a day, look at the little $29 gauge, and assume everything is OK,” Chris Womack told us in a telephone interview from his San Diego office.

But over the three years leading to February’s debut of CellarSensor, Womack conducted field studies inside real life cellars owned by serious connoisseurs. The results, in some cases, were horrifying. One Miami cellar owner was handed data showing continuous 10-degree swings in temperature (56 to 66) and 20 percent spikes in humidity across a 24-hour period after the installation of CellarSensor equipment.

CellarSensor collects data every 15 minutes (accessible by registering at www.cellarcentral.com, or via scheduled email alerts). The volume of data depends on the number of zones in a given cellar and the number and type of sensors the owner decides to integrate. Womack says one CellarSensor base station can support up to 64 zones (and if you know anyone with that many zones, then we have definitely found our Control Freak Poster Boy!).

“I was never able to find anything (in the cellar monitoring space) that is easy to set up and that gathered data in a concise way,” Womack said.

Rooted in hardware developed in partnership with a company in Nagano, Japan, CellarSensor tracks two key readings. Air temperature and humidity is handled by one sensor; liquid temperature by another. The latter is a simple probe placed into a water-filled wine bottle placed on a rack with all of the other wine-filled bottles. Multiple sensors are advised because it is well established that humidity and temperature in a cellar fluctuates from the walls toward the center of the room.

Womack told us recently that at least 200 inquiries have come in since February’s formal unveiling and that the company expects to begin fulfilling its first orders for the new product around April 1. Collectors can visit www.cellarcentral.com to learn more about the technology and annual monitoring service, or to submit an order request. (The phone number is 800-330-4132).

“We are working to implement an authorized distributor program to allow customers to purchase our product from builders and advisors locally, as well as from our website,” he advised by email last week. 

A base station, which is preferably connected to a perpetual home internet access network (cable modem or DSL), and one sensor comprises the CellarSensor starter kit ($595). Each additional sensor is $245. There is a three-year monitoring package at $199 that prices out at $5.53 per month. One- or two-year commitments also are available.

Womack offers one additional bit of advice that is more common sense than high-tech, and is certainly endorsed by HinsdaleCellars.com.

“The amount of wine in a cellar creates huge thermal mass,” he said. “The more wine, the less likely you are to experience fluctuations.”

– Steve Woodward