I’ve never used any of those, but I had good experiences at Off the Vine Cellars for the years I lived in OC. Maybe a bit far if you’re in the north end of the county, though.
Adam, there is storage by Home Depot (Savi Ranch) that advertises that they have controlled climate storage for wine.
I haven’t checked it by myself. Only saw theirs banner.
I store at WCC in Irvine. They have 2 buildings, across the street from one another. I like their receiving as they will hold all wine for up to 30 days at no additional cost. That gives me time to pool deliveries when I receive. They have various lockers and walk in options. Accessibility for me is not an issue as I work right down the street so I can be there in 10 minutes when I am in my office.
Been storing at WCC for a long time. I’ve bene happy. They are very good with receiving now. You get an email when you get a package.
For social stuff that has dropped of a lot over the years. There was an incident plus I think Irvine really cracked down on partying in the area with all of the newer apartment building going up in the area. I know The Original Wine Club had something of a scene prior to the pandemic. With the pandemic I imagine all similar scenes are mostly on hold.
On accessibility I’ve noticed over the years that there is some correlation with cost. Lower cost storage is typically more limited than higher cost. At least for WCC, they are open typical business hours into the early evening weekdays. An hour or so extra on Sat. Closed Sunday.
I agree with Cris that socializing doesn’t seem to be part of the wine storage model around here now. Frankly, with places that close at 5:00 or 6:00 and are often super cold, I’m not sure they were ever that great of choices for places to gather and taste/share wines. The idea of it always seemed better than the actuality.
Spectrum is the same. And in my experience, if you aren’t a total scofflaw about it, they’re not really looking to ding you if you run past 30 days for some reason, though I can’t say that definitively going forward.
They’ve been good about this during the last 2 years because of Covid but I try not to take advantage of it because there are certainly times of the year where they just don’t have receiving capacity for everything all at once. I’ve let them know if I need more time and never been dinged extra for it.
WCC had nice private rooms before shutting that down due to the incident. They all moved over to TWC until pandemic shut down that. Oh they are still socializing a few nights a week. They just moved to Big Mikes store across the parking lot
There was actually a lot of socializing at the local wine storage places for many years. WCC had events occasionally plus has facilities that were used frequently by members for their own events. As I hinted at above, that was cut back to almost nothing prior to the pandemic. Legends Cellars used to host some large events back in the day. Those also went away with Irvine cracking down and personnel changes. And Legends, of course, has been swallowed into Spectrum and moved. Both places also often had people casually drinking a bottle just for the heck of it too.
Everyone thanks for the help. I figured the community scene may have been shut down in the last three years, probably risky to assume it will come back soon. I just checked out the location Andre mentioned. It seems well suited outside of the community aspect. Accessibility is off the charts due to location.