I caught this disease young.  23 years young in fact, from reading books by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson and the Guardian’s wine columnist at the time, Malcolm Gluck, who’s book Superplonk was my reference for all good Supermarket wines under £10.  My thirst for wine was fuelled by these three and so I began stashing bottles in all sorts of weird dark and quiet places.  No great temperature regulation, just cool, dark corners of anywhere that I could hide them.

I’d learned that wines were often marketed before their best, so I began hunting down bargains and stashing them away until they were fully mature.  That way, I thought, I’d always have the perfect wine nearby for whatever occasion I could muster.  A stash that I could admire and stroke from time to time and watch grow.

These days the selection of wines available to us is incredible.  Supermarkets have never sold such great quality with such a broad selection, and the wine shops, most notably Majestic, have everything any new wine collector could ever wish for.

And what could you wish for?  Put simply, if I spent £10 on a well chosen bottle today, I’d expect it to taste like a £15 bottle if I kept it for a year or two.  It’s got to pay it’s rent.  And the good news is, pretty much every wine does.

Take classic, pale, Provençal Rosé for example.  We’re encouraged to buy the Rosés of last years production, making them not even a year old when we really want to be drinking them in, of course, the height of our Summer.  They’re refreshing and delicious, but give a bottle one more year sitting in bottle, it’ll develop texture as well, making it even more delicious.

This works for Rosé and it also works for fresh, vibrant whites.  At two to three years old, they’ll still have that vibrant fruit but they’ll have developed a richer mouthfeel – smoother, more subtle and a whole lot more tasty.

And then we get to the richer whites and the reds.  This is where the real fun starts.  Even a well made, simple Côtes du Rhone can taste a whole heap better with three to four years bottle age, and if you like a buttery Chardonnay or a Riesling with a smack of petrol on the nose (really?!), then you’ll be in for a treat.

Let’s not finish though without touching on storage.  You’ll need to keep your gems in a cool, dark place with minimal temperature variation – i.e. away from a radiator and ideally central heating – but that’s not as difficult as it sounds.  A sealed box in a cupboard as far away from a radiator as possible works well.  If you haven’t got any space then do what I did – take it to your parents house and hide it.

My five top tips for getting started collecting wine:

1. Get a cellar book to keep your stock records and notes.
2. Buy a few bottles of the same wine so you can try it at different stages in it’s evolution.
3. Don’t keep fresh Rosés and Whites for more than 2 years.
4. Don’t keep any white wine (unless it’s very very special) for more than 5 years
5. Don’t keep any red wine (unless it’s very very special) for more than 10 years