During Covid, we put rice, flour etc into the cellar. Seems like it has been discovered, so we removed everything and replaced it with humane mousetraps. Oliver the cat, erstwhile Presidential candidate and serious gourmet, is useless. At 15, he has absolutely no interest, and the cool temperature just made it worse. Two minutes in the cellar, and he joined us upstairs maiowing plaintively. It took a few bites of Bayonne ham, AOC, to shut him up.
I am assuming the mice will do no damage to the wines, but we did go overboard with the traps, with one success to date. We left him at the Rockefeller preserve.
Really, just kill it. No need for a guilty conscience. Kill them quickly or you will have a house full. Evolution is the process of critters learning what NOT to do to survive. You will not feel so kindly if a pack of mice chews through your electrical insulation and burns down your house. (a significant percentage of rural house fires are caused by chipmunks and squirrels doing that very thing). It’s us or them.
We had a couple mice but my cat made short work of them. Btw cats killing mice isn’t at all humane; they torment them for hours (think of it as a toy that won’t stop playing with them) so I ended up smashing it with a box after watching her chase it for a few minutes.
Jonathan has seen many cellars where mice chewed corks that were actively leaking (not that you have any of those), so yeah, get rid of 'em.
Amusingly, we had some mice in the kitchen last winter. They liked plain but not seasoned breadcrumbs, french but not red lentils, and totally rejected all but the Japanese rice.
Our young boy, too (just under a year old) caught a mouse in our apartment and just walked around a bunch with the critter in his mouth until dropping it on his Ripple Rug(tm, fantastic toy) so that it could run away and he could resume the game.
Some cats are just more white-collar than others, I suppose, and yours is reaching retirement age.
Poison can result in a stinking carcass somewhere you can smell but cannot access. I recommend something like this. Use peanut butter for bait, dispose of the mouse and trap together.
Also do a once over to outside to see possible entry points for the mouse into your cellar. Go get 'em!
Put food/grains in big / strong tubs to avoid pests.
Just use old school mouse/rat traps, they are far swifter than some of the other methods that may cripple/maim the animals, or give them a lingering death.
But note that if you use those kinds of traps, you need to have some kind of safety protocol around those areas, if you have other pets. Our dog, as a puppy, got his paw nipped when I had forgotten about that.
The poisons have a lot of drawbacks IMO. We had another dog eat a whole bowl of rat poison, which didn’t really seem to bother them though.
Just don’t ignore the pests, they can cause tremendous amounts of damage very quickly. I had to redo all the carpets on a car once when mice tore up the interior once.