How to Cellar Wine

"Cellaring" wine - keeping it for long-term storage - is not a widespread practice among the current American wine-drinking public. Following a couple of simple rules is the key to keeping wine longer than a week or two.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Wine Racks
• White Wines
• Red Wines
• Wine Glasses
• Wine-vintage Charts
• Wine Refrigerators
• Wine Spectator Subscription

1. Understand that wine has three enemies: light, heat and lack of humidity.
2. Keep bottles out of direct sunlight (in a box or closet, for example) if storing for more than a week or two. Prolonged exposure to light can alter the chemical structure of a wine. Wine bottles, especially for red wines, are made from dark glass for this reason. Yet dark glass alone is not enough to keep a wine in its original condition for very long.
3. Realize that heat is probably worse for wine than light. Wine can easily start to taste cooked after just a few weeks at higher temperatures. Store wine in the coolest spot in your home. If you live in an area where summer temperatures exceed 80 degrees, you should keep your air conditioning set to a minimum temperature of 73 degrees. An alternative to high utility bills during the hot months is to keep your wine at a storage facility. This might seem like a strange idea, but you might be pleasantly surprised to find out how inexpensive these facilities can be.
4. Consider lack of humidity. If you let a wine bottle stand vertically too long, the cork will shrink enough to allow air into the bottle, oxidizing the wine. As long as the wine is in contact with its cork (by leaning the bottle at a minimum 45-degree angle) it is safe. However, realize that exposure to extreme levels of humidity can cause a cork to mold.

Tips & Warnings

• The longest-lived wines are kept in subterranean caves that have fairly high humidity and a constant temperature of roughly 50 degrees.
• A wine must have the right characteristics to enable it to improve with bottle age. The three most important characteristics, in no particular order, are tannin, sugar and acid. Both red and white wines can have one or more of these characteristics, but red wines generally improve more from aging.
• You may have noticed that a lot of sauvignon blanc bottles are made of clear glass. This is because few, if any, sauvignon blancs are made to be aged.