Collectors are all over the place – collecting stamps, baseball cards, and even ex-spouses. And with greater interest in fine wine, a lot of folks just like yourself are socking away a pricey California cab or a cool Bordeaux, waiting for the wines to mature enough that they will be your ticket to Nirvana.

Ninety-nine percent of wine purchased retail is consumed within the first 48 hours. That includes not only the oceans of white zin and flabby chardonnay, but also many wines that are intended for the cellar, including first-growth Bordeaux, like Lafitte and Latour, which often need many years to mature – and that is a tragedy.

In a culture where instant gratification is the norm, it’s hard to look at your bottle of 2002 Caymus Special Select that you just spent $149 for and say, “I’ll wait until I’m 50 to enjoy it.”

But the greater the patience the larger the reward. A mature red wine from a classic vintage is amazingly complex. The tannins are soft, not hard and sharp enough to bite your tongue off like they would be if you drank them years too early. There are still a lot of black currant, raspberry and other red fruit nuances, but also a lot of tobacco, coco and other earth tones once they have aged.

There is a beautiful symmetry between fruit and earth when red wines mature; the earth tonality takes years to develop in a bottle that has been properly cellared. The earth tones take longer to develop, and are very much in the background – these tones take years to be released and are only released through proper cellaring. When a wine reaches maturity, there is that balance between fruit and earth: the color loses a little of the red and has a brown tinge, the bouquet is a symphony, every sip is a unique experience and the finish lingers.

Hey, wine guy, how do I get started collecting?

First you have to get some wines that have aging possibilities, and for that you have to go to a fine-wine retailer.

There are wine shops, club stores, gourmet grocery stores and liquor stores. The worst are liquor stores – poor selection, bad prices and poor temperature controls. Club stores offer good prices, but have a small selection and no one knows anything about wine. Gourmet grocery stores have a decent selection, OK prices and good temperature controls, but lack specialty items and have a limited import selection. Wine shops have the selection, good pricing and knowledgeable staff.

When you walk into the wine shop, check out the temperature. If you feel a little warm and it seems over 75 degrees, run to the exit and don’t look back. The wines are being stewed – when wines are exposed to prolonged heat they become cooked. Although the wines are usually still drinkable, they have a stewed prune flavor mid-palate and the finish is gone. You get about 30 percent of the wine’s potential.

It is a good idea to think of wine as being like a pet frog – it cannot deal with extreme temperatures, hot or cold; otherwise it’s curtains for Kermit.

In order to cellar wine, you need a wine cellar, a temperature-controlled wine locker or a Vinotemp. The two things you are trying to control are temperature and humidity. Temperature is so that the wines age properly, humidity is so the corks don’t dry out and turn your wine into expensive vinegar. A proper storage temperature is between 55 and 60 degrees, and wines should lie horizontally in racks to avoid cork drying.

How long do you keep wines cellared? It depends on the vintage. Fortunately there is a lot of information out there, from vintage charts, notes from wine publications and the World Wide Web.

Here are 25 great domestic wines to cellar. California cabernet sauvignon: Mayacamas, Heitz Martha Vineyard, Etude, Ridge Montbello, Saddleback and Vonstrasser. California and Oregon pinot noir: Domaine Drouhin, Bethel Heights, Joseph Swan, Hanzell and Morgan. California and Washington merlot: Twomey, Leonetti, Etude, Swanson and Chappalet. Syrah and petit syrah: Lava Cap, Stag’s Leap, Justin and Neyers. California zinfandel: Ridge Geyserville, Ravenswood Old Hill and Dickerson, D-Cubed and Biale Aldo.