For most of us, the idea of keeping a cellar full of wine is an aristocratic throwback or an investment banker's affectation. We buy wine for now, not later. Most estimates from retailers and market research suggest 80-90% of bottles are consumed within 24 hours, and 90-95% within a week.

But cellaring a few bottles needn't be the preserve of the grand and loaded. All you need is a dark place where the temperature is consistent – light and fluctuations in temperature are the biggest enemies of ageing wine. Provided it's away from a radiator, a cupboard under the stairs, a space under the bed, even an old fridge in the garage set to a high setting will do just fine to begin with. I keep my few dozen special bottles stacked on a cool stone floor beneath a dresser in my draughty old house. I've even got a thermometer down there.

If your collection gets more serious – or simply bigger – you might consider investing in a tailor-made wine fridge (a friend swears by her Samsung, which holds 33 bottles; £249 from John Lewis). The question of what else to put there is rather more complex. Most wines – not far off 90% – are designed to be drunk within a year or two of the vintage. If a wine is to age, it will need to have high levels of fruit flavour, acidity and, if they're reds, plenty of tannin. Even with all of those elements, however, things may not pan out; the tannins may not soften, the fruit may fade out, it may never, in wine speak, come round.

Many wines that will evolve beautifully taste gawky and awkward when young, and it can be hard to tell them apart from all the other gawky, awkward wines that are destined to remain that way forever. Even experienced tasters can't say with certainty how a wine will age, and no two bottles, even from the same batch, age the same way.

So it's no wonder that wines from regions and producers with a long track record for ageing dominate most serious cellars. In reds, that tends to mean Bordeaux and Burgundy, followed by the Rhône Valley, Piedmont (barolo, barbaresco), Tuscany (chianti classico, Brunello di Montalcino), and Rioja; for whites it means riesling from Germany, Alsace and Austria, chenin blanc from the Loire, and chardonnay from Burgundy, with dessert wines from Sauternes, Germany and Tokaj, and champagne, port and madeira also featuring in the mix.

My ideal cellar would feature as many of these as I could afford (and cellar-worthy wines do tend to be anything from a little to a lot more expensive). But it would be wrong to assume that these classics are the only wines worth keeping. We still tend to think of Australian and Californian reds as oaky fruit bombs, but our attitude would be very different if more of us tried their more serious wines with a bit more age. The same is true of the Australian whites, Hunter Valley semillon and Clare or Eden Valley riesling, and I've been impressed with how well some of the reds from Portugal's Douro Valley and France's Languedoc-Roussillon develop.

Not everyone likes the taste of older wine. Youthful fruit and vibrancy often trump the more mellow and savoury qualities of age. But if you're curious about the ageing process my advice would be to buy a half-case of one of the wines featured above, drink a bottle now, and then stash the rest away. You may just find that sometimes, even in the frenzied Twittering world of now, patience can be rewarded.

Six affordable cellar wines

Castello di Potentino Piropo IGT Toscana, Italy 2008 (£13.95, fromvineyardsdirect.com)

An unusual blend of pinot noir with the chianti grape variety sangiovese and a little of the unheralded alicante from a British expat winemaker, this beautiful Tuscan red is alive with cherry fruit and fresh herbs now, but it could mellow and soften still more over the next half a decade. BEST BUY

Château du Cèdre Cahors, France 2009 (from £15.95, Lea & Sandeman; Roberson)

Made from the local côt, aka malbec, a grape variety successfully appropriated by the Argentinians, this is an attractively fleshy and fresh red now, but with a certain gutsy power that will repay a decade or so in the cool and dark.

Grosset Polish Hill Riesling, Clare Valley, Australia 2012 (from £23.95, slurp.co.uk; Noel Young Wines; Haynes Hanson & Clark)

With its searing, linear, directness, Jeffrey Grosset's crystal clear Aussie Riesling is quite formidable (but cold-water-on-the-face refreshing) when it's young, but will take on layers of toasty limey complexity for many years to come.

Quinta do Noval Late-Bottled Vintage Port 2004 (From £15.60, Ocado; Lea & Sandeman; CambridgeWine Merchants)

The LBV style of port is released when it's ready to drink, and this one has the purring power and chocolate-edged dark fruit to make it a joy right now, but my experience of older vintages suggests it's worth squirreling the odd bottle away for at least a decade.

Château Poujeaux, Moulis-en-Médoc, Bordeaux, France 2009 (from £25, as part of a case of six bottles, Tesco; Laithwaites)

The staple of the classic cellar and the serious collector, red Bordeaux is re-mortgage pricey at the very top end. Look beyond the bigger cru classé names, however, and plus it can be affordable if not cheap, and Poujeaux's lushly fruited 2009 will keep for more than a decade.

Berrys Barolo, Italy 2008 (£24.95, Berry Bros & Rudd)

Barolo is famously tough and tannic when it's young, but this example from posh merchant Berry Bros very superior own-label range was already quite silky when I tasted it in situ last year, although it has stuffing enough to add to its ethereal rose fragrance for five to ten years.