If wishes came true we would all be blessed with a heat regulated and air-purified wine cellar. These mean you can put your feet up and not concern yourself with your wines welfare as they will always be in the best environment to age beautifully. This is very rarely a reality however and the majority of us just try to make the best out of what we have. Here is some great advice for storing your wines safely.
Location. Your bottles, both white and red wine, are best placed in a cool room, away from the light and with moderate humidity levels. The perfect temperature to maintain your wines at is 10° to 16° C (50° to 61° F). Anything above this will cause a loss of wine quality and above 25° C will have serious adverse affects on the wines characteristics. The wine can change colour if left in direct light and also increase in temperature. The bottle’s cork can expand or shrink depending on the levels of moisture in the room air. This can result in air forcing its way into the bottle and causing oxidation, a well known negative that occurs when wine has prolonged contact with oxygen.
Positioning. You should lay the wine bottles on their side or slightly elevated when in storage. This is down to the fact that if there is no liquid in contact with the body of the cork for a sustained period of time it will dry out and contract. This can cause the wine to suffer from oxidation, a mentioned previously.
Display. You don’t allows want your wines tucked away in a dark room. Sometimes you want to bring them out for the world to see. A good choice would be a wooden wine cabinet because these tend to maintain a steady temperature and you can also store your decanters, dinnerware and other glassware etc in there too. Don’t use one that has a glass covering as this can lead to the greenhouse effect and warm the wines up.