An archway greets all who enter Gary White's basement wine cellar, where insulation, an air-conditioner and tilted cedar racks help create the best possible conditions for properly aging the wine.

White got into collecting seven years ago, after he fell in love with a bottle of Petrus his wife had given him. Ever since he has become, quite simply, a man in thrall of wine. Caught up in a genteel pastime with a reputation for having unspoken rules of decorum, White remains all glee, no condescension.

But there is one thing he gets a little snooty about. Don't you dare call yourself a wine collector if you don't have a proper cellar for storing your treasures. "It's like saying, 'I'm gonna buy meats but I don't have a refrigerator,' " he says, his tone full of exasperation and exclamation points.

Wines that are meant to be aged before they're served like to do it only one way: reclining inside a cool, dark, humid place. In such repose, in such a spot, a wine can move into maturity at its proper pace, its complicated chemical reactions free from the influence of spoilers such as strong odors, temperature fluctuations and direct sun.

If you have access to a damp cave in the wine-growing region of France, that will work just fine. But if you happen to find yourself in the New World and want to store your prized possessions the right way, chances are you'll need to construct a refrigerated room inside your house. This may sound extravagant, but after all, White reminds: "It's food! It's food!"

No surprise, then, that White's is a cellar on a grand scale. Fed up with the storage space in his old house in the Bay Area — a cellar that was the wrong size, too hot, and cooled by a unit with a persistent drip — White commissioned a custom cellar for his new, 7,800-square-foot home.
 

Unvarnished Western red cedar is suitable for wine racks because it tolerates the humidity needed in a good wine cellar.

His house sits on a high slope on Cougar Mountain and looks across Lake Washington toward downtown Seattle. The cellar is in the basement in a 200-square-foot space that could have been a bedroom. White had the room's window removed and its walls coated with a thick insulation that keeps the heat out and the cool in. Then he called in a local wine-cellar designer, Kevin Pettit of Vintage Solutions (www.vintagesolutions.net), to finish the job.

Pettit grew up in Chehalis and studied chemistry at Columbia University in New York, thinking he would be a doctor. But then he got interested in two other things: wine and carpentry. Eventually he combined those two interests and, using his knowledge of chemistry to help him understand the complex process by which wine ages, began building wine cellars.

"The whole maturing process is basically a bunch of competing chemical reactions," he says.

The purpose of a wine cellar is to make sure those reactions take place at an auspicious pace. To this end, the space must be kept a very precise type of cold. Purists say no colder than 55 degrees, no warmer than 57. Pettit says anywhere from 53 to 60 is all right, and he carries an infrared thermometer that lets him know if any of the valuable liquids in his cellars are outside this range.

Then there's the humidity. It should be kept at a moist 60 to 70 percent, Pettit says. In White's cellar, the humidity is exactly 68 percent, and the moisture in the air buckles the labels on his wines and yellows the informational papers he puts beneath each bottle.

A weather-tight door is needed to seal the whole thing. For White, that's a thermal-paned glass door framed in Western red cedar.

Inside, you pass through a 7-foot, wine-holding arch. If this is not a triumphal arch, it is hard to imagine what is. All around, walls are lined in racks capable of holding up to 3,400 bottles. Like the door, these racks are made of unvarnished Western red cedar, which is valuable in the humid environment of a wine cellar because of its natural resistance to rot.

The bottles lie on their sides, held by the racking at a 17-degree angle, which Pettit believes is the perfect angle for keeping the cork wet. "You can ruin a wine quicker by drying out the cork than probably any other way," he says. (A dry cork can lose its seal, causing air to infect the fragile liquid.)

Besides the silence of aging wines, the only sound in White's cellar is the low rumble of a professional-grade air conditioner. That, and his excited voice:

"This is a perfect wine!" he is saying, referring to the 1990 Chateau Montrose. "You can't get any better. I found it at what I consider a reasonable price for a perfect wine: $230."

White has about 1,300 bottles, but thinks he could store 8,000 if he kept some in boxes on the floor. That he's actually imagined this possibility is a sign of his passion.

Another sign is the money that White, a retail consultant, has spent. Building the room cost close to $26,000, according to Pettit. Then there's the cost of the wine itself. He's found collecting so addictive he has put a cap on his monthly wine expenditures. "I'm not gonna tell you what my budget is," he says, "but I do have one, and I'm constantly up against it."

Creating a nice cellar doesn't always require making a huge investment. Pettit has built cellars that hold as few as 200 bottles, in spaces as small as closets. If you have a naturally cold basement, you can create a "passively cooled" cellar, which alleviates the need to buy a pricey air conditioner. Plus, not only expensive wines are worth collecting. White is truly as enthusiastic about his bargain finds as he is about his costly bottles.

"This one — this one's SPEC-TAC-U-LAR," he says as he pulls out an Italian Pinot Grigio by Pravis. The price: $11. The Pravis replaced, White is off again, ranging around his cellar and pulling out bottle after prized bottle: "This is a perfect wine," he says, and the way he says perfect, with equal amounts awe and reverence, you begin to realize that this is a man thrilled anew by each wine he turns to.

He is now standing under his triumphal arch, holding a 1976 Penfolds Grange Hermitage. "It's already 25 years old and it can age for another 25 years," he says, marveling. Then he puts the Penfold's back in its rack and moves on down the wall, pulling bottles in and out, checking and rechecking the progress of his aging treasures.

Eli Sanders is a Seattle freelance writer. Barry Wong is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.