Chateau 55 wine storage in San Diego

If you’ve read much of the material on this website, you are probably aware by now that I have two pet peeves – serving red wines at room temperature and storing wines improperly.  Now there are a number of reasons that you should really worry about wine storage, such as:
·        The Shadow Mountain (distance) reason.  We visited a couple of wineries in Warner Springs and found some very nice wine, coming home with four bottles of Nebbiolo from Shadow Mountain (see last review) and two bottles of a very-peppery Zinfandel from Hawk Watch (soon to be reviewed).  The problem is that these two wineries are a good distance away, so when you do visit them you bring home more bottles of wine than you have room for them in your storage locker.  Hence, this
·        The Espinosa (sell out) reason.  As mentioned above, I like a very-peppery Zinfandel, and Espinosa has a great one.  Unfortunately, I am not the only one who likes their Zinfandel -- their last release sold out in just two weeks.  Two weeks!  Needless to say, it makes sense to buy lots of it when it is available, requiring extra storage.
·        The Palomar Mountain (party) reason.  Sometimes you want to buy a lot of wine in advance of a large gathering or party.  In my case, we’re holding a family reunion in San Diego this summer.  Now the family name is Trovato, and Palomar Mountain just happens to have a blend that they have named Trovato….
·        The Poppaea (aging) reason.  Most red wines get better with age.  Generally speaking, the higher the tannin level, the longer the wine needs to be aged.  I call this the Poppaea effect because Poppaea makes a red wine from the Sangrantino grape.  This grape has a very high tannin level, so it requires ten years or more of aging to get close to its prime.  In some sense, this is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind issue, namely you are not likely to open a bottle of wine that you really want to age if it is not sitting in your house.
So, what to do, what to do?  Well, you can spend a lot of money on a wine storage cabinet, some of which I show in the About section.  But there is an alternative, namely taking your wine to a commercial wine storage facility.  To this end, I have arranged a deal with Chateau 55 to give you a discount.  Chateau 55 is a state-of-art wine storage facility on Sorrento Valley Road just south of the Carmel Mountain intersection.

Link to Chateau 55 Website

They offer both full lockers and community lockers to hold your wine.  The upstairs lockers are the smallest full lockers with 13 cubic feet of storage space, enough to hold around 8 cases of wine.  They run $19.50 per month.  The lower level lockers are larger (18 cubic feet, enough to hold 12 cases of wine) and run $36 per month.  If you rent a full locker you get a fob that allows you access to your wine on evenings and weekends.
For the community locker option, you pay between $4 and $5 per case per month, ideal if you are looking to store less than 4 to 5 cases of wine.  However, the community locker option does not come with a fob, so you can only access your wine during working hours.
What about wine shipments, you say?  I mean, wouldn’t it be nice if my wine clubs could just ship the wine directly to Chateau 55?  The answer is yes, they can.  In fact, if you leave them a key, they’ll just put your wine in your locker.

I have an arrangement with Chateau 55 to make it a bit more appealing to try them out.  Chateau 55 will give visitors to this website a free month’s rental and a 5% discount for their first year of storage.  I like numbers, so here they are:
Without discount, ground level storage locker for one year:      $432.00
Savings from free month and 5% discount for first year:            $  55.80
Discounted first year cost for ground level storage locker:         $376.20
That’s an ~13% discount.  If you go with an upstairs storage locker, the first year total is $203.78, saving you over $30 dollars or ~13%.  In comparison, you will probably pay $1,500 or more for a wine refrigerator to hold that much wine, you will need a dedicated electrical service for the unit, and you’ll need a place to put it.  In addition to the high cost of large wine refrigerators, the electricity cost is not insignificant, especially if it puts you into a higher usage bracket.
As a final note on Chateau 55, they have some tables in their lobby and a conference room off to the side with a conference table.  Over time they plan on turning this front into a nice place to drop by, visit your wine, and maybe spend time hanging out with other wine enthusiasts.