Let’s first talk about how to store your wine. Wine is a perishable product. Even if stored under ideal conditions, eventually every wine will oxidize, turn brown and slowly become undrinkable. Wine deteriorates about 4 times faster in ambient (room) temperature environments than it would in a suitable, temperature-humidity controlled environment. There are many ways to store wine, but the primary factors to consider when thinking about how to store wine and what to invest in wine storage capabilities, are fairly simple. Ask yourself these questions:
- Am I planning to create a small wine collection (10 to 50 bottles) or a large wine collection (100 to 1000+ bottles)?
- Am I into buying expensive and high quality wines, or am I more interested in table or bulk-type wines?
- Will I typically buy and drink wines in a relatively short period of time (within 1-2 years), or will I be buying wines that I plan to age for longer periods of time (2 to 10+ years or more)?
- Do I want to age my wines and ensure they have the optimal environment for maturing and evolving over time?
- Do I understand my wines and how they were created? Some wines were made to age for 10, 15 or even 20 years before their intended flavor and aromatic profiles reach a peak. Others were crafted to be consumed in the near term…1-3 years. It is imperative that you understand the wine maker’s intentions when your wine was made.
If you have a small collection of wines with a high turnover rate (i.e., you drink them relatively quickly over a short time period); if you aren’t into investing in wines that are of a quality you care about losing; and if you don’t particularly have an interest in aging your wines for more than a year or 2, then you are very likely fine simply storing your wines on an open rack, at room temperature, where the natural fluctuations of temperature and humidity won’t impact your wine experience. There are many types of wine racks available for this type of storage, including stand alone racks, table top racks, wall mounted racks and more
However, if you have invested in say, more than 50 bottles of wine, where some are of higher quality, and where a portion of your collection requires storage for optimized aging over longer periods of time, then you should consider investing in some type of cellaring capability for storage of your wine. There are many ways to properly “cellar” your wine. These can include storage of wine in cool basements, where temperature and humidity fluctuations are reduced, custom designed temperature/humidity controlled rooms or grottos, or temperature controlled cooling units (refrigeration units). The most expensive of these approaches is the custom designed, walk-in rooms that control temperature and humidity. They are typically very aesthetic and luxurious, but require a large, dedicated space for wine collections that are typically large and expensive. Some examples are shown here:
From my experience, the most effective and cost efficient way to store wines is to invest in standalone cooling units (of various bottle capacity) to fit your needs for how many bottles you have, and for ease of placement inside the home. I currently have 11 different wine cooling units in my home that are configured to hold between 32 bottles and nearly 200 bottles each. I prefer the thermoelectric cooling units since they are more power efficient and create much lower noise and vibration for the wines they contain. Some examples are shown here.
The critical factors you should consider, or that influence wine and how they age in the bottle are temperature, humidity, vibration, light, bottle position, vintage, and aging profile. If you store wine in an environment where temperature and/or humidity are fluctuating over a wide range as a function of time, you will certainly be risking the quality of your wine and providing opportunities for your wines to develop faults. If you are spending your hard earned money on wines of quality and substance, and if you genuinely care about your wines and the drinking quality of your wines, it’s important to invest in the required infrastructure to ensure your wine investments are protected and stored in an environment where they have the optimal conditions to age and evolve over time, without developing faults.
Since my website is primarily focused on red wines, I will address the environmental conditions and parameters that are pertinent to red wines here in this section. Consistent temperature and humidity values, with minimal fluctuations, are very important. Minimizing light contact is important as it can induce “light shock”, which can invoke chemical reactions in wine and initiate premature aging. This is why bottles of red wine are made of dark glass. Also, reducing vibration of the bottles is also important. Vibration can cause complex chemical reactions affecting acids and reducing esters thereby affecting flavor. In addition, vibration can increase propanol in the wine, effectively reducing aromatics and accentuating acetone notes. These effects result in creating a higher refractive index of the wine, which can translate into a sweeter tasting wine. Finally, vibration also can disturb sediment in the bottle. Lastly, bottle storage position will help to optimize settling of sediment and aging conditions of your wine. Since the cork is the only barrier between your wine and the outside elements, it is essential to provide your wine bottles with an environment that keeps the corks supple, moist and leak-free. If the corks dry out, they will be more apt to shrink and create a leak-path for air to attack the wine. Therefore, it is important to store your wine bottles in a horizontal position, ideally slightly beyond horizontal where the bottle opening (corked end) is slightly lower than the bottom end of the bottle. This ensures that the volume of wine in the bottle fully fills the neck of the bottle, saturating the cork.
The optimal parameter ranges for storing red wines are provided here:
Storing the wine is only half the battle! Once your wine collection gets into the low 100’s the issue then becomes – how do I manage my wine, to ensure I’m drinking the wines at their peak age and not letting them age too long?!? Since wine collections typically consist of a diverse spectrum of wine types, both red and white, both single varietal and blended wines crafted from an array of wine making techniques, keeping track of the projected peak aging ranges can be a very challenging task. Managing incoming wines (from wine-club shipments and periodic wine purchases) versus outgoing wines (from gifting and drinking) can become a more serious activity as the number of wines increase in your collection. You certainly wouldn’t want to have to throw out some high quality aged wine simply because you forgot to drink it before it passed its prime! So as you might have imagined, there are many approaches wine enthusiasts use to manage their wine collections. Some use custom spreadsheets. Other’s use custom or commercial software packages to manage their wine databases. Other’s still use cell-phone apps such as Vivino, Cellar Tracker or VinoCell. These apps provide user’s with a means to create wine inventories, communicate online with other wine app users in a social media environment, conduct wine reviews, store pertinent wine data and bottle photographs, as well as create real-time wine databases that can be managed to add or subtract wines in your collection using your cell phone. I have found Vivino Pro to be my app of choice, not to say that other apps may be better, more user friendly or even more effective. As an example of the Vivino Pro wine database features and capabilities, I’ve provided a thumbnail link you can click on to bring up a previous Vivino-generated spreadsheet that captures all of the key elements associated with my wine database as of February, 2019. While there are more fields that are captured as part of this wine database, I have deleted some of the columns to make the spreadsheet more manageable for purposes of this website.
Hopefully this section of the site has been useful in helping you determine how best to store and manage your wines.
