Keeping food in a wine cellar

Food & wine
1

I am lucky to have a temperature controlled cellar where I keep wine, and as there is a bit of space left I was wondering if there would be any risk (risk for the wine) in storing food as well. Not as a general purpose food storage, but to keep seasonal products.
When fruits are in season, typically cherries, apricot or apples, buying a few boxes of them and storing them at 12C would keep them for a couple of months.
The other thing would be mountain cheese; it would be very satisfying to see a small wheel of cheese maturing close to the wine aging to be drunk with it.

But the chemical and biological processes of fruits and cheese maturing could have some side effect on the wine, for example through bacteria spreading in the cellar. Has anybody already experimented with such a dual purpose use of a cellar? I saw wine and cheese being aged in the same building, but not on the same room, but I think it was wine to be drunk within a couple of years.

2

We have long used the wine cellar as a larder for veg, cheese and charcuterie with no taste-able ill effects.

My mentor Edmund Penning-Rowsell did the same. His wines went for very nice prices when auctioned after his demise and I have been lucky enough to taste quite a few. Absolutely sound, and the product of great storage.

3

I do it almost 20 years. Vegetables. Opened oisters waiting ro be served. Cheese. No chocolates : it catches the smell of the cellar.

4

Thank you both, very reassuring.
I’ll be careful with chocolate, wouldn’t want it to get the cheese smell.

5

I remember hearing a horror story in Burgundy about a small vigneron & apple grower who stored his bottled chardonnay in the same room room as his apples, and his wine subsequently tasted strongly of apples…

This might have been a vigneron’s urban myth, of course, and the storage/flavour overlap is probably just a coincidence!