Whether you want to keep the wine you bought from your new wine club for an anniversary or build a basement-collection to enjoy over time, appropriate storage is essential for preventing the wine from spoiling.
Have you set the right temperature? Which way are you going to rack the bottle in your fridge? How to handle it? Do you need a special wine fridge? Read on to find out answers to these questions and ways to seal your wine bottles after every use today.
Whether you want to keep the wine you bought from your new wine club for an anniversary or build a basement-collection to enjoy over time, appropriate storage is essential for preventing the wine from spoiling.
Have you set the right temperature? Which way are you going to rack the bottle in your fridge? How to handle it? Do you need a special wine fridge? Read on to find out answers to these questions and ways to seal your wine bottles after every use today.
1. Set The Right Storage Temperature
Love sipping on French Chardonnays that you ordered from your favorite white wine club online? While it tastes crisp and spicy at the right temperature, Chardonnays can taste oxidized and be ruined at the wrong temperature in storage.
Stability is the first tenet of wine storage. Wines like Madeira easily adjust to warm temperatures as it’s made during warm climates for easy storage starting from the Portuguese era of winemaking. Take a look at the best temperature for storage for all the other wines below.
- For short/long storage, most wines demand a consistent temperature of 520
- Make sure that the temperature doesn’t drop below 250F or -40C as it can freeze the wine.
- Temperatures above 200C or 680F can trigger aging and damage volatile bonds.
2. Store Sideways & Not Upright
While keeping your wine bottles vertically on the bottle rack looks fancy in the fridge, storing wine bottles horizontally is the correct storage method if you want the wine to taste fresh.
When you rack the bottles horizontally, it dampens the cork and prevents the wine from oxidizing by expanding and blocking the air during different climates. Moreover, it’s considered the safest angle to prevent the bottles from tipping over during earthquakes.
Another reason to start racking your bottles sideways is that such a technique can help you use the maximum space in your cooler, basement, or cellar. If you want to avoid the problematic fungi that affects wine corks and taints wine, it’s better to pick screw caps whenever possible.
3. Avoid Light & Shaking
Once you’ve got the wine in your hands, it’s important not to keep it on the table next to the window or avoid shaking too much. There are two things you need to understand when it comes to handling wine for appropriate storage.
- Light can be damaging because sunlight also contains UV rays. This is how you can check if parts of the label were exposed to the sun by assessing its fading. Generally, dark rooms will help your wine become clearer by the day.
- Movement or vibrations from objects like the washing machine, dishwasher, generator, and so on can disturb the sedimentation process of the wine while in storage.
4. Use a Specialty Wine Fridge
Do you love California reds from your favored red wine club? Then, an ordinary refrigerator might be killing your favorite Napa cabernets. This is because most refrigerators cool consistently at 40-degrees Fahrenheit and below, which is beneath the recommended range of 450F to 650F. If you have an elite-grade refrigerator, it might have temperature settings for Champagnes at the best.
A wine cooler or fridge, on the other hand, comes with highly adjustable cooling and humidity controls, unlike the household fridge. You can set the temperature and other specifics according to the particular wine you store inside it.
5. Properly Seal Already Open Bottles
Science says uncorked wine changes its tastes, aroma, flavors, and even color up to five days after opening. Hence, it’s best to seal your wine the right way when you’re not finishing a bottle in a single sitting.
While you can’t reuse wooden corks, rubber corks are useful for creating a tight enough seal. If you want to create a better airtight lock, get a wine vacuum pump. It will help you drain the air out of the open wine bottle to create an airtight seal in a jiffy. This is excellent if you like to enjoy a bottle of wine slowly over a week.
Bottom Line
When you’re storing wine even for a day, it’s important to prevent spoilage. Use a rubber seal, set the temperature of your fridge or wine cooler appropriately, and keep it horizontally in the dark without shaking or high-vibrations. Doing so prevents the wine from becoming oxidized and losing flavors. If you love your wines, be sure to always store it accordingly.