Store your rare vintages at Jim Murphy's new Canberra wine cellaring business

Got a rare wine or a prized vintage? Robert O'Dea's happy to look after it for you in Canberra.

Jim Murphy's at Fyshwick has started up a personal wine cellaring business for people who want to store their favourite wines in optimum conditions.

Owners Robert O'Dea and A.J. Murphy, son of the late Jim, have built a humidity and temperature-controlled wine cellar at their store where Canberrans can store anything from individual cases to whole collections.

Fellow Canberra wine merchants Candamber Fine Wines previously had a cellaring service for 15 years, but closed it in 2015. Another cellaring option at the moment in Canberra is through a storage facility in Hume.

Murphy and O'Dea originally built the wine cellar as an extra service for Jim Murphy's customers, who might purchase a rare wine and have it cellared for them. But then, O'Dea says, they decided to expand it to anyone who wanted to store wine.

The minimum is one case and there's room for 7000 cases in the cellar.

Canberra Raiders coach Ricky Stuart is already on board, storing some of his wine at the cellar.

"Jim had an existing cellar on site. He used to store wine for Rick there," O'Dea says. "Rick was in the store two or three months ago when we showed him the new facility." He wanted in.

And winemaker Nick O'Leary is also storing some of his museum collection.

O'Dea says the wine cellar keeps everything at a constant temperature of between 12C and 14C, with a relative humidity of 65 to 75 per cent.

"The most important thing in cellaring wine is not to let it get too hot. If it's over 25C, it will get damaged," he says. "The global standard is 12C to 14C, where the wine is evolving and evolving gracefully."

Pricing is on a sliding scale. "Our minimum price is about $2.50 per dozen per month for the first three months," he says.

And a big part of the wine cellaring is to protect the store's own collection, such as Penfolds Grange bottles that have to be kept until they are ready for release.

"There is some pretty exciting stuff just from our own collection. There's stuff that Jim has from the 1970s, there are some wonderful old bottles that are part of Australian history," he says.

Robert O'Dea's Wine Cellaring Tips

Too hot and the wine spoils

"If your cellar is consistently warm, the wine will age prematurely. It won't age as gracefully. If it's too hot, the wine literally cooks, it spoils."

Too cold and it goes to sleep

"The wine will go dormant and if you open it after 20 years, it won't have changed."

Keep temperatures steady

"Within the spectrum of healthiness, which is 12C to 20C, you still don't want your wine to be jumping up and down in temperature. Your wine is expanding and contracting, and while it's contracting the wine draws air in through the cork."

Watch your corks

"A lot of wines like Penfolds Grange are still aged under cork. If it's too humid, you'll get mould on your cork."

Check in at 10 years

"Ten years is the magic number for me, where premium wines start to show signs of evolution in the bottle."