Some things change and others don't. The weather has changed. Jake Lorenzo hasn't.

Thirty years ago, when we moved to Sonoma, summers were wonderful. The heat of the day would arrive around three to five in the afternoon, and while it occasionally reached 90° to 95°F, it always cooled down in the evenings. Then, as now, we would likely have guests to dinner. Early evenings were comfortable and we'd wear shorts and t-shirts while sitting at the table on our porch sampling course after course and drinking bottle after bottle with our guests.

Typically by nine o'clock our guests would be shivering and begging for sweaters, jackets, scarves, thermal blankets or anything else we could find to keep the chill away. New Yorkers would cry with their nasally whine that it was colder than an unheated subway car in February. People from Colorado would tell us that snow was warmer than a summer night on our porch. Poor friends from Arizona, so used to sweltering summer nights, had to be lowered into our hot tub just to thaw out.

That's how it used to be in the summer in Sonoma. We'd have warm days with hot late afternoons, but most evenings were cold. Sure, we'd have the rare three-day heat wave and the nights would stay comfortable until later, but you could count those nights on the fingers of one hand.

Nowadays, that has all changed. We have triple digit temperatures at least 15 to 20 days every summer. Heat waves will often last six or seven days. It's as if the fog has something against Wine Country and won't come all the way up here from San Francisco anymore. (Maybe the fog doesn't like the sky-high wine prices or the $250 per night hotel rooms or the incredibly rude service, but Jake Lorenzo digresses.)

Jakelyn's mother and I still have friends over for dinner. We often sit out on the porch having our multi-course dinners and our bottles of wine, but most nights we stay in our shorts and t-shirts as late as midnight. Half of the time, we can make our late-night run to the burrito wagon without jackets. Midwesterners delight in our warm evenings and low humidity. New Orleanians love sitting outside without being devoured by mosquitoes and gnats, but we locals know there is a price to pay.

The weather has definitely changed. It could be global warming or excess body heat from the ever growing world population or friction from the government printing presses as they make the money to pay for all of the bail-outs, but things in Sonoma are getting warmer. In fact, they often get downright hot.

When it's broiling outside and Jakelyn's mother's garden is wilting like a stressed Cabernet vineyard in a September heat wave, Jake Lorenzo says it is time to rearrange the wine cellar. At the old house my wine cellar was underneath the house. One wall was buried into the hillside and the temperature naturally stayed in the low sixties most of the summer. The new house, which is already approaching nine years old, sits on flat land and I had to build the wine cellar inside the house. I cool it with a simple wall air conditioning unit jerry-rigged to an external thermostat.

That wine cellar is one cool place to hang out on a scorching summer day. My inside cellar holds 60 cases. (I have another wine cellar outside in the garage.) At both ends of the cellar I have wall racks that hold rows of bottles stacked on top of one another. Each row handles six bottles, unless you try to stack those new fangled, ridiculous bottles that refuse to sit atop one another and insist on falling in crashing avalanches to break on the cellar floor.

I start with the wall racks. The short stacks, with just two or three bottles remaining, get moved over to the lay-down rack. Then I search through my cased wines and fill in each row with six bottles of the same wine. The rows on the right hand side I fill with my homemade wines. Most are Pinot Noir and I try to place them in ascending order by vintage date. The rack on the left side is primarily for those commercial wines that I have found thrilling enough to justify purchasing full cases. When I finish, I'll stand back in the cool comfort of the wine cellar admiring the rainbow of shiny, bright capsule colors.

I have a long, floor-to-ceiling lay-down rack. It has six 10-foot long shelves and each one holds about 50 bottles. I've got sections for Italian, Spanish, French, Australian and ever-expanding Argentine wines. As I work my way through them, I find lost treasures and discover wines that need to be consumed sooner rather than later. Then I move on to the varietal rows. These rows are filled with California wines. One whole shelf is devoted to Pinot Noir. Others share Zinfandel, Merlot, Cabernet, blends and odds and ends like Tempranillo, Grenache and Sangiovese.

I work my way slowly through the rows arranging the bottles by variety and vintage date. I take note of duplicate bottles and older vintages, making mental notes about what we should drink up in the near future. I can't help myself. Certain wines make me think of meals I can prepare and friends I can invite to help consume them.

Thinking of specific meals reminds me to check the eclectic white wine section atop the right hand wall rack. Torrontes from Argentina, Gewürztraminer from Alsace, Pinot Grigio from Italy sit alongside Riesling from Australia, Sauvignon Blancs from New Zealand and California and even a nice selection of whites from Bulgaria. Atop the left hand wall rack I inventory the sparkling wines and check my dwindling Port supply.

It is leisurely, mindless work, this rearranging a wine cellar. Clanging the bottles, reading the labels, breaking down the emptied cardboard cases is simple but on a sizzling summer day, working by the shadowy light in the cool room satisfies my soul. Jake Lorenzo takes solace in these unsure economic times, that baring some sort of natural disaster that wipes out my house, I have enough wine to get me through the rest of my life.

I take out an 11-year-old Pinot Noir that I have found. I pull the cork. It is sound. I decant the wine noticing the beautiful, garnet color. I pour a taste into one of my 16-ounce wine glasses. The aroma is breathtaking: full of ripe fruits and dried violet with earthy spice. I taste the wine and it fills my mouth with rich, velvety textures and luscious dried fruit flavors. I marvel at the long finish as I refill my glass and pour another for Jakelyn's mother.

It doesn't matter how hot it is outside. There is something supremely satisfying in a good, perfectly aged bottle of wine from your own cellar. It's a reward for patience. When it comes to wine, that never changes. wbm