Can't save 'em, so drink 'em

From upper New York state to Texas to North Carolina and then finally to California in 1987, Spector had tried all sorts of storage solutions for his wine, which he loves to share with friends. Nothing worked well enough for him to grow a collection -- the temperature fluctuated too much, the cabinets shook every time someone walked by, the crawl space was too dirty. And then of course there were the moves -- usually an excuse to throw a big party and drink away whatever had accumulated before the moving van arrived.

"Then I moved to this house and thought, 'I want the wine cellar, so let's bite the bullet and get under the house and put one in,' " Spector says. "But every time I thought about it, I pictured the floor caving in. I'd talk to Miki about it, but I'd say I couldn't do it."

That was Erez, Spector's friend and contractor with Perfect Service of Orinda. One day when he and Spector were sitting on the deck behind the house, the idea came to him: "We'll put it under the deck."

Spector's eyes lit up.

"Once he got that idea, it was like, 'Let's start digging now,' " he says. "Here would be a way that I'd have a real underground wine cellar where I don't need a refrigerator, and it would be big enough to come in and spend some time with the wine and really know what I have, and I wouldn't have to worry about my house collapsing."

After breezing through the permit process -- neighbors could hardly complain about the impact of an invisible addition -- and slowly excavating all of that dirt with a small jackhammer because there was no access route for large equipment, Erez and Spector called on Perfect Service's "European master" Paul Cohen to put on the finishing touches.

"The first thing was that when you come into the cellar, I wanted there to be a big, imposing door, something that you know has something behind there," Spector says. "I wanted it to look old and be round on top. Once we started with that and were able to make the door look so old, things started snowballing: OK, let's make the whole thing look old, make it look like it's been down here 100 years, so that we can tell somebody, 'You know, we were just building a deck and found this room down here.'

"It became a lot of fun, and I think you do get a feeling when you come down here that it's a different place or a different time. That was the idea, detail after detail."

"It does look old," says Erez. "It looks old by the door, by the walls, by the floor, by the racks."

A place to hang out

The racks can hold 750 bottles -- they're about half filled now -- and there's room to grow to perhaps twice that while still keeping the bottles easily accessible. Spector quickly found, however, that easy access isn't making for quick egress.

"When I bring people down here, they want to hang out," he says.

So, a huge barrel in the center serves as a table for the two chairs in the room. Take off the barrel top, and, voila, a hidden bar neatly holds wine glasses and even some heartier spirits for those who prefer their liquid with, say, worms in it.

"Not everyone is a wine lover," Spector notes.

Which brings us to that question of the resale value of Spector's subterranean fantasyland. The structure is waterproof and fireproof, with no ventilation except the crack under the door, so it could be marketed as a bomb shelter. In fact, says Spector, "I think we're safe against anything except a tsunami."

It could also work as a darkroom, with the temperature, which Spector has been monitoring via Internet cable device, in the mid 50s with low humidity. (The optimum temperature for storing wine is said to be 55 degrees.)

But Spector doesn't care what others see. It's his house, his wine cellar, and he's not going anywhere.

"When you embark on a project like this, you can't do it thinking, 'I'm going to get all this money back one day,' " he says. "Because then you'll start cutting corners. You'll start trying to make it not really a wine cellar, but a wine cellar-slash-storage room.

"You can't do a project like this that way. You have to just decide on what you want and go for it."

And then you pop the cork on a 1993 Chateau Le Boscq.

"I always thought that if this house had a wine cellar, it'd be perfect," says the 53-year-old Spector who's lived in his house just steps from the Berkeley campus for seven years, and who also notes ruefully that in each of the places he's lived — upstate New York, North Carolina and three other spots in Berkeley — he's never had a true wine cellar.

"We were sitting on the deck one day, and Miki said, `I got an idea. We'll put it under the deck.' I thought it was a great idea. If the deck collapses, the deck collapses. At least it's not the house."

Using an appreciation of wine cultivated from his dating a girl 30 years ago — a young woman who, prior to Spector, had dated the son of the owner of the best wine store in Rochester, N.Y. — Spector created a wine cellar that puts any of Epcot Center's exotic "Pavilions" to shame. The France Pavilion, in particular.

What makes it work is its whimsy.

"We thought of various ideas, one being you didn't know there was a wine cellar here. A person could stay in the house a few days and I could say, `Oh, hey, you haven't seen the wine cellar yet, have you?'" says Spector. "The other idea was to make it look hundreds of years old. I'm not a good liar, but I thought about saying something like `We were putting in the deck and digging in the ground when we hit something really hard.'"

The final wine cellar, hidden beneath a trap door in Spector's slatted backyard deck, combines both of those ideas. The door opens — with the help of a pair of Murphy bed hinges to make lifting the door easier — and fading away from the bright Berkeley sun and into darkness is a set of stone steps that could be straight out of a French chateau.

The stairs end at a heavy, arched wooden door with an ancient-looking, heart-shaped padlock. Beyond the creaky door are eight naked light bulbs, hanging pendulum-style from the ceiling, and beneath them is a set of criss-crossing wine racks. Behind are ancient walls with bits of hay embedded in them. Above are wooden beams that appear salvaged. In the middle of it all is a giant urn with a charred wooden lid.

"This pot is 500 years old," says Erez. Then he adds with a smile, "Kidding."

The project is obviously one that takes furniture distressing to a new level, for each accent has a secret. That 500-year-old pot is anything but. The lid, oiled and burned in a special aging process, lifts off to reveal storage for wine glasses, a Rabbit wine opener and a bottle of Makers Mark for any non-wine drinkers.

The ancient walls are really Tuscany material — a ground marble — with hay hand-massaged into it. The wooden beams have been painted with an oil that, after drying, creates a variation in color. They've also been cut into pieces with a circular saw and nailed back together, to complete that "salvaged look."

Hidden behind one of the beams is the only admittedly modern addition: a temperature and humidity monitor connected to Spector's home ethernet. It records the temperature every 15 minutes, and on this near 70-degree day, the cellar is a perfect 57 degrees.

Among the approximately 285,000 wine cellars in homes across Alameda and Contra Costa counties, it's the only known excavated one of its kind, says Erez. And though the cellar no doubt enhances the value of Spector's home — the base cost for the project was $136,000, but with additions, it's amounted to a couple hundred of thousand — that wasn't the intent.

"It's such a personal vision," says Spector. "If you go on a project like this, thinking you'll keep the costs down in hopes of ultimately getting more for your investment, you'll fall short of keeping it unique, and your own."

As Spector returns a 1993 Carruades de Lafite Pauillac to its spot in the rack, he ruminates on the young woman who 30 years ago planted the seed that resulted in his underground, oenophilic lair. Ultimately, he says, he didn't get the girl.

"But I did get custody of the wine," he says.