A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for the Financial Times on the growing fashion for building new wine cellars in your home or installing trendy, new wine fridges. The reasons why people are doing this, of course, are pretty obvious. Wine is becoming increasingly popular while very few homes actually come equipped with their own subterranean cellars.

So it makes perfect sense to have your wine conveniently accessible and to know that it is being stored correctly. Moreover, if you have a lot of the stuff, keeping it in your own cellar saves on the not insignificant cost of laying it down with a merchant or professional storage company.

However, it also emerged that another reason why some people were installing a wine cellar was to add to the value of their property and make it more marketable.

William Kirkland, of John D Wood estate agents in Oxford, told me that a good cellar would add value to the purchase price. And with the right buyer, it is the sort of thing that could clinch the deal.

Since then, Standard Life has produced a report which actually puts a figure on how much a wine cellar can add to the value of your property. According to its figures, building a wine cellar can increase the value of a home by between £10,000 and £15,000. Put another way, that's an average increase of seven per cent on the value of the house.

"Our research shows that two million Britons are planning to build a wine cellar, or buy a wine fridge in the next five years. And the people we spoke to anticipated that the investment could add value to their homes," says Standard Life's marketing manager Ashley Ramsay.

Clearly, all this is very good news for manufacturers of wine fridges and cellar construction companies, of whom there are now a growing number in the UK. One of the best and most cost-effective is Spiral Cellars (www.spiralcellars.com) who have carved out a large slice of the market. Moreover, as their prices start at around £9,000, this could provide a good return on investment. Another reputable company who will also create a practical and effective cellar for your home is Smith & Taylor (www.smithandtaylor.com).

Of course, if you can't dig quite so deep, physically and financially, there is the wine fridge alternative to keeping your wine in tip-top condition. Prices generally start from about £1,000 for a specialist cabinet, and two of the best suppliers of this kind of kit are EuroCave (www.eurocave.co.uk) and Transtherm (www.transtherm-uk.com).

Both provide a good range of products offering different sizes, features and finishes.

Once you've got your wine fridge or custom-built cellar, all you need is some decent wine to put in it. So this week, I'm recommending four seriously good wines, which I would be both proud and delighted to keep in my cellar or to pull out and drink.

The first is the 2005 Villa Wolf Pinot Gris. The historic JL Wolf estate was taken over by Ernie Loosen, last year's Decanter Man of The Year. The wine comes from the warm and more southerly Pfalz region in Germany, adjacent to Alsace. And yes, folks, it's German. Please don't let that put you off, because I can assure you that this richly elegant food wine is quite sensational.

Then we head over to New Zealand to the Te Mata Estate in Hawkes Bay. Te Mata's wines are something of a legend in New Zealand, as is its owner John Buck. I met him last year at a tasting at the Oxford Wine Company and was so impressed that I ordered several Te Mata wines, including the 2004 Woodthorpe Cabernet Merlot.

From Hawkes Bay, it's a relatively short hop across to Australia and the brilliant 2004 Butchers Block Marsanne Viognier, made by Turkey Flat, one of the Barossa Valley's leading lights. Finally, we touch down back in France and more specifically with the Gold Medal-winning 2003 Chateau Nardou in the up-and-coming appellation, Cotes de Francs.

For more details on the wines and to order this week's offer, click here.