'How I committed the ultimate sin of keeping wine for too long'

So that’s how I ended up, a week before Christmas in my new house where the builders were mid-renovation project, but they had disappeared back home to Poland with the promise of returning mid-January.

I wouldn’t normally bother you with my domestic arrangements, but wine is a vital part of my household belongings, and it takes a lot of packing. My previous house had plenty of room for wine.

There were wine racks in what I laughingly called my office, wine racks in the (temperature-controlled) garage and wine stacked up in the hallway.

Then there were quite a lot of glasses to deal with too. Not only the posh ones I use for dinners, there are crates of serviceable ones I use for when I give talks and my set of matched tasting glasses which nobody else is allowed to use.

Most people worry about whether the furniture will fit in their new home. I worried about my bottles and glasses.

The time constraints, and the fact we were only moving 500 yards down the road meant that this was an ‘all hands on deck’ move with the help of friends, family and two helpful chaps in a white van.

Reluctant to leave my wine in the hands of these cheery volunteers and the fact there was nowhere to put it until the builders had finished the job, I begged boxes from local wine merchants and packed it myself.

Those out-of-town storage units come in very handy when you need to store wine, so long as you have shelves to put the boxes on. At least, during this busy period of lifting boxes of wine, I didn’t need to go to the gym. I was getting quite enough exercise moving bottles.

There wasn’t time to sort through the stocks and discard anything that was past its best. Everything got packed, and it is only now as the boxes come back from storage that I am discovering what I have been harbouring all these years.

The real point behind this story is that I have committed the ultimate sin of keeping some wines too long.

There was the bottle of top-notch Bordeaux that was given to me by a class of wine enthusiasts I had steered through their wine exams years ago.

It is long past its drinking window and really should have been enjoyed by now. There is a magnum of lovely champagne that got forgotten because its size meant it didn’t fit into the various racks I had. So, left in a box, it had other wines piled up on it and it has become old and lacking sparkle.

There are some clarets that suffered the ignominy of being lost for some years during a previous house move, and yet they still haven’t been drunk.

Having rediscovered them, last week I opened a 1989 Cru Bourgeois Bordeaux Ch. Cissac, 35 years old, long after it should have been poured, and it was surprisingly lovely. It was like stepping back in taste with its gentle, ethereal, elegant fruit.

Yes, it was faded, but it was like meeting an old friend after not seeing them for decades. The alcohol level of just 12% was typical of that era, still refreshing.

But there were plenty of unremarkable wines too. Some were duplicate tasting samples, and some were gifts that had just been put in the rack and never retrieved. But the biggest surprise was the sweet wines.

I love sweet wines, from Bordeaux, Loire, Austria, Hungary, Australia, even sweet wines from the desert of northern Chile, but I really don’t like them alongside a dessert.

Sweet wine is almost too much after dinner, especially when there is a chorus from guests saying they “don’t like sweet wine.”

After producing a dinner, it is too much effort to go into persuasion mode to coax guests into sipping a glorious Sauternes. What shall I do with these? I am planning to put them in the fridge, a few bottles at a time and invite friends round for mid-afternoon nibbles of cake and cheese.

Those who vehemently don’t like sweet wines can have a cup of tea instead, but I bet I will convert some of them to the delicious counterpoint of sweetness and acidity that these wines possess.

My biggest regret from the move was saying goodbye to my favourite wine rack which had stood in my temperature-controlled garage for decades.

Rescued from a Yorkshire school, the bank of solid wooden school lockers, still bearing the names of pupils who probably have their own families by now, made a fine storage unit for hundreds of bottles.

I thought I might have to take this behemoth of a unit to the tip but after advertising online, those school lockers were picked up by a chap renovating his kitchen and have begun a new life.

He even sent me a photo of them, now stripped of their blue paint and wax polished to perfection. In their place I have a quiet, elegant tall wine fridge which will do the job perfectly, but without the character my beloved school lockers.

The moral of this story is simple. Whether you are moving house or not, regard your wine rack as somewhere that needs the occasional sort out.

Clear out the oldies, and if you can’t bear to give them away, put them next to the stove and slosh them into sauces and gravies. Don’t hold on to special bottles that came from friends just because looking at them reminds you of happy memories.

Make a positive choice to bring them out, and drink them, toasting the giver if they cannot join you round the table. Wine is for drinking and sharing, not hoarding. I shall try to do better in this new residence.