Connoisseurs Hope Presidio’s Bottles Don’t Bomb

SAN FRANCISCO — Call it the alcohol arsenal. Deep in the heart of San Francisco’s old Presidio Army base, a 106-year-old munitions bunker is being recalled to duty as a rent-your-own wine cellar.

“Everybody -- they’re just going wild with it,” said Christo Kasaris, the wine enthusiast and self-storage entrepreneur who is behind the bombs-to-bottles venture.

About a year ago, Kasaris was looking to branch into the specialty business of wine vault rentals when he decided to scope out the Presidio, a sprawling swath of lush green woods and red-brick buildings perched near the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge that was converted to private use in 1994.

There he found an 8,500-square-foot military bunker with 3-foot-thick concrete walls, an interior temperature at a near-constant 59 degrees and a relative humidity of about 70 -- just right for wine. At the time, it was being used to store tractors.

“The minute that I walked in, I said, ‘Now that’s what I’ve been looking for,’ ” Kasaris recalls.

The bunker, started in 1897, once held eight mortars capable of lobbing 12-inch shells at any invaders daring to sail into San Francisco Bay. But none did, and the batteries were taken out of use during World War II.

Turning the ex-home of mortars into Presidio Wine Bunkers was no simple task. Walls were cleaned and painted, electrical wiring was ripped out and replaced, and partitions were installed, under strict requirements to not damage the historic site.

Some work is still going on -- Kasaris plans a paneled tasting room -- but the vaults are slowly filling up with bottles of the good stuff. A space capable of storing 25 to 30 cases of wine goes for $45 a month.

Inside, the bunker is a no-nonsense facility with square corners and solid wooden doors. But there’s history in the air; narrow grooves running down some corridors show where trolleys once trundled heavy munitions. In a cupboard, a heavy handled communications setup still stands.

“Most storage facilities are in industrial areas because of the price of land, so they just lack the ambience, the charm of this location,” said David P. Jones, a wine consultant who will provide free storage advice to bunker clients.

Using bunkers to store fine vintages makes sense because wine’s chief enemies are heat and light, said Tom Martinez, storage expert at K & L Wine Merchants, a large premium wine seller in the San Francisco Bay area. “What you’re trying to avoid is the big temperature swings.”

The Presidio wine bunker isn’t the first outfit to get militant in the battle to protect rare wines.

In rural Connecticut, a Cold War-era bunker built by a consortium of banks and insurance companies from the Hartford area to protect records in the event of nuclear war has been converted into a wine rental facility, Horse Ridge Cellars.

“The fact that it’s in this ultra-secure underground bunker -- they sleep well at night, I guess,” Horse Ridge owner Jed Benedict said.

And in Hong Kong, some World War II bunkers are being converted into Crown Wine Cellars; a storage facility is now open and a clubhouse is under construction.

Presidio Wine Bunkers opened this summer and so far reaction among wine producers has been good, Jones says.

“They think it’s sexy,” he said with a grin. “And they’re all jealous they didn’t think of it.”