How to Store Wine

Video Transcript

"Now we're going to talk about how to store wine. You may be a collector in which case you might have a cellar. More likely you're like myself and just like wine but don't have a cellar. If you don't have a cellar, the ways to store wine, the most important thing about wine is it needs to be kept in a steady temperature, a cool temperature, out of light and away from vibrations. I myself live in a flat so I tend to store my wines in the kitchen in the coolers cupboard of the kitchen, out against a wall that's never exposed to sun. Having found your location where there's no light, no vibration, and you've got a steady temperature, preferably around twelve degrees centigrade, eight to sixteen is fine, but it needs to be cool. And dark, and no vibration. You need to take your wines and you need to lay them down on their side. This is a typical wine rack you would find at the shops, which puts the wines slightly so that there's no air, so that there's no air between the wine and the cork. The reason you do that is that the cork if it dries, it actually shrinks and it lets air in. Once it gets more air circulating into the wine, it oxidizes and ages your wine. Oxidation is fine in very, very small quantities because that's how you actually age your wine. But if you have too much air in there by having a dry cork, which you will get if you stored your wine standing up, by having too much air in there, circulating your wine ages much faster. And in most cases wines are dated and have a recommended time to drink. So if you think you're going to drink your wine in two years time, yet it's exposed to air, you might find the wine has gone off by that time or is not at its best. Sometimes when the air is away from the wine if the wine gets warmer, for any reason and expands slightly, it pushes itself out and it actually creates a wet and rotting cork. So you want to at the best to have the air bubble actually touching the cork as well as the wine itself. The wine has to be in contact with the cork to prevent the cork drying out, shrinking and letting air in, therefore oxidizing your wine. Red wines and white wines can be stored in exactly the same way if they are - have a cork enclosure, so on their side in dark, in the cold, no vibration. These days though, we're now getting wines with screw caps. These are ideal for white wines that need to remain fresh. They work well with red wines as well, because they create a hermetic seal so no air gets in or out, it means your wine can actually be stored upright in this case, and you are not actually having to worry about a cork being kept wet. Furthermore in the modern world it means that you can put them up - you can store more bottles of wonderful wine in your kitchen cupboard or under the stairs. Or in a wardrobe somewhere. These have the flexibility that you can put them on their side, and you can have them upright, no problem with air circulation whatsoever. We have yet to see how they will age the more expensive wines that need to be aged for five, ten, fifteen years. What we have found is that they will keep a young wine fresh and crisp, a young white wine. When you've got a cellar sometimes your wine will come in wooden boxes such as these, best is to leave them within the wooden box on a shelf somewhere within your cellar. Same if you just have a normal kitchen place to store. If they're sealed it keeps the air steady, it keeps them in the dark, and then you can conveniently shove them somewhere under the kitchen units. And they will be fine there. But the key thing about storing wine is that aspect about no vibration, no temperature fluctuations. But obviously temperature fluctuations do happen. The important thing there is that they're very slow. If you have sudden changes in temperature, that has a big effect on wine. Another very important thing is wine shouldn't be stored above eighteen degrees centigrade or twenty - the drinking temperature basically, because above that you're starting to seriously damage your wine, and also you shouldn't really store your wine anywhere near freezing point so we are saying about four to six degrees centigrade. Below that, water starts crystallizing. So that's how we store wine."