Storing Wine

First of all, let’s look at the bottle and see what closure it has? Cork? Screwtop? Maybe even glass? 

Cork needs to be kept in moist conditions, which is why it is recommended to store a bottle horizontally, lying on its belly to keep the cork in contact with the wine. This is especially helpful if you plan to age your new purchase for a long time. This way the wine inside the bottle will be in constant contact with the cork, so it won’t dry out and limit the access to oxygen this way. When corks dry out, the bottle can start leaking and let’s face it - no one likes leakage. This is why classic wine storage cellars tend to be very humid - to support the cork and as an additional help for not drying out. 

When it comes to screwtops or glass, you have a closure that is not dependable on moisture so it doesn’t really make a difference if you have the bottle standing up or lying down. Should you still be unsure, just store it horizontally anyway. Basically -  if in doubt, lie it down. 

So we know how to position our bottle, but where do we put it? 

If you have a cellar unit, great, is it a pretty moist room? Even better, get a little rack and put all those bottles there, it should be dark, moist and easily accessible - you don’t want to fall over trying to reach your favourite bottles. But what happens when we live in a cute little flat that doesn’t have a cellar? If you don’t have the luxury of a cellar unit, don’t panic, we can work around this, based on the assumption that you don’t plan to store your wines for next 10 - 50 years. 

(Hence this will be a guide for the average person who may live in a flat, who will not have access to a cellar unit.)

Go through your flat and find the coldest room. Room temperature in the last century has increased so heavily, now the average flat is heated up to 21 degrees. This is too warm for our beloved bottles of wine, especially for our natural wines, that by nature need a little better storing than conventional wines. As natural wines contain less so2, which acts as an antioxidant and therefore protects the wines from deteriorating with oxygen, we need to make sure that our low sulfured wines are stored correctly. 

Before my landlady let me use her cellar space, I checked where my coldest room was and this was the bedroom. No heating, not too much daylight, of all my rooms this is the best place to store my wines.  Safely tucked away underneath my bed, the wines can lie there and enjoy a dark space, it's the ideal place when you don’t have access to an actual storage place for wine. 

Here is why: it’s dark and the temperature will be more moderate. Light exposure is really bad for wines, there is a thing called “UV strike” that has an effect on taste as well as colour and ultimately light strike can lead to deterioration. This is also why wines should ideally be in dark glass bottles, if they are made for ageing. Personally for me, when I see a clear wine bottle I know not to age it, it's a “drink now” wine. Often you will see it with pet nats and when I say drink now, I don’t mean to put pressure on you, I mean drink it within a year or so. If you have clear wine bottles, you definitely need to put them as far as possible from the sun until you take your first sip. 

The wardrobe is another option I used to go for. Especially if you have underfloor heating, you don’t want to store the bottles directly on a warm floor, so a wardrobe becomes handy, maybe not on the top shelf, as that feels risky to me trying to reach it when it might fall. But the second lowest shelf perhaps? 

Whatever you do: never ever store your wines in the kitchen. 

The temperature fluctuates too much while you cook, you want to provide the most stable, moderate temperatures as possible for the wine. The ideal temperature generally speaking to keep and store wine is 11 degrees. The lower the temperature you store the wine at, the less active the wine, as bacteria thrive and grow with higher temperatures, simply said. The hotter the temperature, the more molecules are active, leading to a quicker change of wine. At domestic room temperature the wine is 4 times faster to deteriorate, than at lower temperatures.* At correct temperatures the wine will still change the older it gets, however at a much slower pace. 

An important word that keeps being used in winemaking that I believe also applies to wine drinking is: patience. If you stress the ageing process, by storing it in unhelpful conditions, it would be like skipping the slow cooker for your leg of lamb and grilling it within an hour instead, the result may or may not be edible but will it be as tasty as the slow cooked version? I doubt it. 

So this is how I would store wines if I didn’t have a cellar, other folks on twitter have been very creative trying to build spaces in their garages, inserting wine shelves into their wardrobes or also using old fridges that don't need to work anymore, provide a dark, isolated place and asking friends if they have spaces in their cellars or garages if their own place is just not suitable.