Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos. There's a transition period in life where you go from running to the shop to buy a bottle of wine to looking around and realizing, I actually have some wine. I have that bottle I bought at a vineyard last year and that Brunello I've been holding on to that I was told would age well and a few

easy drinkers that I have for last minute dinner parties. This probably happens at a different

age for everyone, but I'm at that age now. And the question I have is, should I start paying more

attention to this? Could I build myself a real little wine collection? And where do I start?

Our wine critic, Jansis Robinson,

is one of the world's most esteemed wine experts. She has made wine accessible to thousands,

maybe millions of people. And earlier this year, she wrote a multi-part guide in the FT Weekend

magazine on how to build an affordable wine cellar. I have asked listeners for your questions on this topic, and Jances has kindly agreed to come on and answer your questions and mine. She's with us today from Lille in France. Jances, hi, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for being here. Okay, so I'd love to start by asking, you know, your guide is for probably slightly more advanced wine connoisseur than me. But let's start from where I'm at and then maybe we can build out. I have usually between maybe five and 15 bottles at home. Some of them are for drinking with a meal on a weeknight, some are wines that I've bought

well traveling, as I said. I have some bottles that I bought young and I know will age well.

Basically, I have some wine, but I'm not organized about it. What stage is this?

What you say?

Slightly different from me, whereas I have lots of wine and I'm not very organized about it.

I think the first thing that people should realize is that not all wine improves with age.

In fact, only a small subset of wine is actually worth aging. And that subset really is worth aging because it will

taste so much better than when it's young. But anything under maybe £15, $15 a bottle

is definitely not worth aging. It will have been made to be drunk almost as soon as it got off the bottling line.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's exciting if you've decided you have got some bottles that are worth aging.

And the most important thing is, as I say, the conditions in which you age it.

You really don't want to store wine at

temperatures much over 20 centigrade or 70 Fahrenheit. Because in that case, the kind of complex

aroma that the wine producer has so carefully put in the bottle will be effectively sort of boiled off over time.

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