Cellar/Cellaring Nomenclature

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TinCup

Can't Leave
Nov 14, 2019
341
969
Indian Ocean
Bit of a newb Q but having not heard it in this context before joining this site I’m curious as to the history/logic that led to ‘cellar & cellaring’ being commonly used to describe keeping a range or quantity of pipe tobacco. If I was asked to describe it before joining I guess I’d have said something like collecting, storing, saving... even hoarding ;)

Hearing ‘cellar’ always brings to my mind images of a curved brick walled underground area that’s cool and dark with a few cobwebs etc & an ideal place to keep valuable wine safe, but maybe it’s different in the US
‘Cellar’ certainly invokes a rather more cultured/refined connotation than simple saying “I’ve stored a pound of xyz” & maybe that has a part to play in why it’s used given how much of pipe tobacco is about the flavour (& from what I read) collectability (as it is with wine)

The reality that the drawer (as in my case), file cabinet, plastic box, old chest etc etc full of tobacco is about as far from what I understand a cellar to be as keeping a dozen bottles of wine in the cupboard next to the beans and saying its cellared… hence my curiosity of how it came about?
 

gervais

Lifer
Sep 4, 2019
2,078
6,973
39
Ontario
just sounds better than "help me, I'm a hoarder"
Yep, I agree with you. It just sounds cool, so we all use the term. Be it just a word we use, wine mellows and changes with age, so perhaps because we believe tobacco does something similar, we put it in the “cellaring of aging goods” category. Not the physical basement “cellar”.
 

AlabamaDan

Can't Leave
Dec 24, 2019
309
487
Alabama
Maybe we should start building tobacco cellars like wine cellars. Imagine a bricked basement with walls lined with cedar shelves filled with jars of tobacco. One wall is a large pipe rack. Subdued lighting. In the middle is a little wooden table surrounded by large comfortable leather chairs... ?
 

sablebrush52

The Bard Of Barlings
Jun 15, 2013
19,621
44,832
Southern Oregon
jrs457.wixsite.com
Hearing ‘cellar’ always brings to my mind images of a curved brick walled underground area that’s cool and dark with a few cobwebs etc & an ideal place to keep valuable wine safe, but maybe it’s different in the US
Nope, that the basis for it. Rather than laying down a vertical selection of Chateau Lafite Rothschild from 1851 to the present in your stone cellar, next to the torture chamber, in the sub basement of your Chateau, you're laying down a selection of scratch and sniff tobaccos to age because everyone tells you it's the thing to do.
Problem is that you don't have a chateau, much less the stone sub basement with next door torture chamber. So you use what's available to you. Maybe you have a finished out basement, maybe you live in an area where nobody has basements. So you use a closet. Wherever you can find a cool dry dark space to store your tins of whatever for the magic day they will be worthy. In a world where "a door is ajar" then a closet can be a basement.
 
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