Press Room >Making Room for Your Wine (Sacramento Bee Editorial)

Making Room for Your Wine
Rented cellars pop up as area grows in affluence

By Jim Wasserman -- Sacramento Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PST Tuesday, January 10, 2006

In booming El Dorado Hills, where half of all households earn more than $100,000 a year, Brian McCarthy aims to prosper by storing fine wines and boats for the people who have everything - except a lot of space.

Tracy Campbell, vice president of marketing for Southfork Management Co., opens a wine locker at Gold Key Cellars, an El Dorado Hills storage facility designed for upper-end customers who don't have room for their wines at home. The underground warehouse has 281 private lockers for rent, and they're kept at a climate ideal for stored wine.

His indoor El Dorado County boathouse is full and his private climate-controlled wine lockers are renting quickly, indicating the affluence and expectations in the nation's 26th biggest metropolitan area and the state's fifth-richest county.

McCarthy is not alone in trying to capitalize on making every wish of the well-to-do his command. Midtown Sacramento entrepreneur Ian Smith will soon unveil 100 private wine lockers for growing numbers of upscale downtown dwellers who want easy access to their creature comforts.

The pair of private wine cellars at opposite ends of Highway 50 are among only a handful locally, including Roseville's Capitol Cellars. Clients there can store up to 25 cases in individual lockers that rent for $52.50 monthly.

"There are a lot of Bay Area transplants who are used to these amenities," said Tracy Campbell, a spokeswoman for McCarthy. A former Navy rear admiral and real estate professional, he recognized that there was money to be made in being first at the metropolitan area's far eastern reaches.

The head of Southfork Development Group, formed three years ago in El Dorado Hills, McCarthy has launched four storage centers catering to what upper-end customers can't make room for at home.

"For 3  1/2 years, we had wine stored in closets and cabinets," said Gina Bartok, an El Dorado Hills resident who just rented a trio of private wine lockers for part of the family's 65-case collection.

She and her husband also store a boat with the company, which boasts one of the first facilities in California to offer "remote dry storage" away from pricier waterfronts.

"With homes these days, and the way they build them, it's hard to get a home with side yard storage," said Jeff Badger of Folsom, a mid-1990s arrival from the Bay Area, who also stores his expensive powerboat at Southfork's first boat storage facility. A second is under construction.

Named Gold Key Storage to appeal to affluent tastes, the newest warehouse in El Dorado Hills Business Park features 281 private wine lockers in an underground setting. Colorful paintings of wine country scenes adorn rows of lockers that hold 8 to 12 cases each and rent for $30 a month - or $25 each for doubles.

Inside, temperatures are cooled to between 55 and 60 degrees and humidity is kept between 65 and 70 percent, optimum conditions for wine storage. Among other benefits, clients who buy cases of wine on trips can have them shipped directly to the Gold Key cellar, where staffers will move the wine to their lockers.

The underground center also offers a kitchen for catered events and a tasting room with a fireplace, big-screen television and a wine concierge coming on duty next month.

"For what it costs, $75 a month, we would not have been able to buy a refrigerator and run it for $75 a month, so it's a heck of a deal and it's a beautiful place," said Bartok. Last month she and her husband, Bill, helped start a six-couple wine club that plans to meet monthly for tastings and make trips to California wineries.

Bartok, a dental assistant, and her husband, a financial adviser, filled one locker with French Bordeaux wines from a European wine-tasting trip last year. California wines fill most of the other two.

Campbell said such tastes are becoming more common as metropolitan Sacramento expands and attracts a bigger base of affluence.

Especially prosperous and fast growing are the Sierra foothills communities of El Dorado and Placer counties, which rank fifth and sixth respectively for the highest median incomes in California, according to the state Franchise Tax Board.

Likewise, a recent demographic profile of El Dorado Hills by the real estate services company, Colliers International, showed an average 2004 household of nearly $100,000 within the community's five-mile radius.

More than 1,700 El Dorado Hills-area households have annual incomes higher than $200,000. Altogether, nearly 10,000 households there earn more than $100,000 yearly.

"There's some serious money up here," Campbell said.

More is expected, as the six-county Sacramento metropolitan area of 2.1 million people grows toward 2.9 million by 2025.

The region is experiencing a "brain gain," says the San Francisco-based Public Policy Institute of California. More college graduates move in from elsewhere in the United States and California than move out, the PPIC reported in 2004.

In midtown Sacramento, Ian Smith foresees "really strong demand" for private wine storage in the plans for 3,000 downtown lofts and monthly rents that have already reached $4,100 a month.

"We've seen the growth in terms of restaurants and clientele and people going out and looking at projects under construction," he said.

Smith and a partner plan to open "58 Degrees and Holding," a wine store and bar with private lockers capable of storing from 12 to 200 cases of wine by April. In early 2005, he opened a similar facility in Tucson, Ariz., where upscale "snowbirds" from bigger cities want wine storage for their vacation homes, he said.

Southfork, which says it's grown into a $135 million company from $10 million in 2003, owes its success to finding niche markets for an upper-end market. In self-storage, Campbell said, Southfork has found higher-than-average returns per square foot with construction and operating costs that are 30 percent to 50 percent lower.

The company, which is expanding into marina development on the East and West Coasts and a 75-home residential project near Placerville, now sees new returns in offering valet-style services to people who store goods at its facilities.

For fees that still haven't been determined, the company plans to deliver wine from lockers to clients' homes and parties. Customers who store their boats with Gold Key can have their boat delivered to Folsom Lake or Lake Tahoe fully stocked with towels, food and drinks and then have it returned to indoor storage and cleaned.

"There are a lot of people here in this county who can afford to do that," Campbell said.

Said Folsom's Badger, who works for a financial services company based in Portland, "That would be a great thing if they were able to do that. You call them, you're working, and they say, 'We'll have your boat in the water and the ice chest full.' I like the sound of that."