Are you a wine connoisseur or enthusiast who owns an ever-growing collection? Are you looking to create a long-term storage solution within your home? Storing your wine on your pantry shelves is not the way to go – there are nuances and techniques to store a growing wine collection to ensure they are well-maintained and taste perfect from the very first sip.
Here are the 5 top tips for those looking to store a growing wine collection at home:
1. Maintain a consistent temperature
Wines thrive in cooler temperatures. Warmer temperatures cause wines to age faster, and while this might sound like something you want, in reality, you often want them to age slowly, so the flavours can be gradually and gracefully enriched.
2. Ensure you keep the humidity steady
Similarly to the temperature, consistency with the surrounding humidity is crucial. In particular, a stable humid environment can help preserve corks so that they don’t shrivel. Shrivelled corks can result in oxidation which is a guaranteed way to ruin the flavour of top quality wine.
3. Darkness is key
This may come as a surprise, by brightness and vibrations both can lead to wine ageing prematurely. The optimal place to store your wine collection is in a dark, quiet, undisturbed corner of the house.
4. Understand the impact of the bottles’ position
If you’re planning on storing a wine bottle for a long period of time, whether you choose to leave it upright or lie it down makes a difference. For corked bottles, it’s essential to keep them on their sides, as this prevents the corks from drying out and letting air inside. For screw cap bottles, it doesn’t really matter.
5. Choose a storage option that works best for your home
There are a variety of different options you can choose from when figuring out how you want to store your wine collection, while still following all the tips above. If you’re low on space, a wine fridge/wine cooler/wine cabinet is likely your best option. Alternatively, if your house has a basement or a wine cellar already built-in, a walk-in wine cellar would be perfect, particularly for those with larger collections.
Follow these tips when storing your growing wine collection at home, and you’ll never have to be disappointed when opening a new bottle again!
