Thank you everyone for the great advice. It sounds like for the
particular bottle I mentioned that I should wait a little while (2015?!)
but that there are other 2000 Bordeaux available that would be quite good
right now.

Ian Hoare > wrote:
> That's quite a disadvantage, though sudden short term shifts in
> temperature
> are worse for a wine than one that's steady but high. Of course you don't
> say whether you're in North Dakota or Arizona, and normal house
> temperatures
> can vary widely between them! I'm guessing you may be in northern
> California, and if so, you're likely to have fairly wide annual
> temperature
> variations. If you have a space under the stairs, that might be a place
> which is less subject to rapid temperature changes.

I'm in New Mexico, the oldest wine producing area of the United States. We
currently have about 20 something wineries in the state that are small to
medium size.

As far as house temperature goes, in the winter at night or during a work
day we allow our house to go down to about 64F (17.8C) and then heat up to
about 70F (21C) when we're home. We have a forced air natural gas furnace
so it can make this temperature change in about 45 minutes.

In the summer when we're away our house will slowly heat up to around 80
to 82F (27C). When we are home we use an evaporative cooler (adds gallons
of water to the air) to cool the house down but it is very slow and can
usually only get down to about 74F (23C) after as many as 6 hours.

The humidity gets as low as 10 percent in the winter and can get up to
almost 40 percent in the summer (because of our evaporative cooler). In
addition to that we are over a mile above sea level. I wonder if the
reduced atmospheric pressure has any effect on the leakage through the
cork :-)

We don't have any stairs that we could store the wine under but we do have
a crawl space under the house which would probably be perfect in the
summer but much too cold in the winter...

I guess if I plan to store much wine for any length of time I'll have to
invest in a small electric wine storage cabinet or I'll just have to buy
the wine and drink it fairly soon (which is what I usually do now :-)

Cheers,
Scott