Don Young moved to Northern California without a bottle of wine in his possession, but by the time he left the region a few years later, he had 350.You could say that Young wanted to bring a little bit of the Napa Valley back to Iowa with him.

“We lived just about 10 miles from the Napa Valley, and whenever my wife and I had spare time, we’d visit tasting rooms Napa and Sonoma,” Young said. “I learned quickly what I liked, and since then, my collection has grown exponentially.”

Young, who lives in the Napa Valley development south of Waukee, is outgrowing his wine cellar and plans now to add storage racks for another 240 bottles. He currently has more than 2,000 bottles in the cellar, which has its own ceiling, insulation, and temperature and humidity controls to protect his investment.

“The cellar’s basically like its own little house, with a separate ceiling from the rest of the house,” Young said. “It’s insulated all the way around and vapor-locked to keep the humidity in. I have the cooling unit to keep it at a constant 57 degrees, because if you want to really age wine, you need to keep it below 60 degrees.”

Young shops mail-order catalogs and buys direct from wineries, but not until he’s studied up on the wines.

“I do what my wife would call an extreme amount of research,” Young said. “I read virtually everything there is published on wine and then I categorize it for ratings from different magazines. I’ll cross-reference ratings plus do my own tasting either out in California or France and Italy and then decide what I want to buy from there.”

The Youngs go on several tasting expeditions each year. Their most recent travels have taken them to California, Oregon, Washington, France and Italy.

“We pick out the wineries that we’re going to go to and zero in on those,” Young said.

When Young finds a winery or a kind that he likes, he gets his name on the mailing list, which is the only way you can order from many small vintners.

“They’re such small wineries that they don’t sell to the general public,” Young said. “They want to stay smaller to keep the production quality high, so it’s all sold through a mailing list, and a lot of those now, because of the popularity, have a waiting list to be on their mailing list.”

Because Young is on so many mailing lists, he ends up ordering wine every month, but he’s cut back on the quantities he orders from each vintner as he’s found more that he enjoys. His favorite is pinot noir, a red wine which he describes as “a real lush, soft wine that goes with about every food.”

Italian wines are also prevalent in his cellar, and he keeps a variety to suit different tastes and occasions. Young’s wife, Karen, fancies German Rieslings, which have lower alcohol content. He also keeps a few other varieties on hand, like cabernet sauvignon for steak dinners and roses, a dry wine he prefers in warm-weather months.

Young has also focused on a few specific vintages his collecting, like 1959, he and his wife’s birth year, and 1981 and 1989, his two daughter’s birth years.

“That way, they (his daughters) can have them when they get married or when they turn 40, they can pull out a nice bottle of their birth year,” Young said.

Young said he sees wine collecting as something that everyone can enjoy. The club he’s in, appropriately called The Wine Group, has monthly blind tastings for its members, who range from professors to lawyers to publishing industry people.

Wines come in prices to suit any budget. “I have wine in my cellar that I paid $9 a bottle for,” Young said.

Soon, Young will add wine from his own vineyard to his cellar. He now owns a vineyard in the central California coast region. For now, the owner of an adjoining property is tending the vineyard in return for the grapes, which he makes into wine at his winery by the name of Stillwaters.

With his new vineyard property, changing food trends and wealth of wine in the world,Young expects his interest to continue growing.

“It’s never ending,” he says. “There’s always something new to learn, new wines to try and new wineries. I love trying different wines.”