Tips for Storing Your Wine 01.04.2016

Sometimes our grocery list comprises of items that we do not intend to use right away and everything needs care and precaution to preserve its quality and taste. When it comes to wine, preventing it from decadence can be quite a fickle sometimes because this exquisite beverage can be spoilt easily. Understanding how to store wines also helps you making a decision about what kind of wine you want to buy. In order to help you understand how to store your wine, we will discuss the ideal conditions for storing wines.

Normal Fridge or Wine Refrigerator?

If you buy wine occasionally or if you use it soon enough after procuring it, then you can go ahead and store it in your normal fridge with other items but beware, if your refrigerator has items of strong odor, they can kill the taste and odor of your wine. So if you are an extensive wine love, you should think of investing in a wine cooler. Another commodity of wine coolers is that they can also prevent your wine from aging any further so you can store well-aged wines in it without the fear of ruining them for a substantial amount of time.

What Makes it Can Also Ruin it

Oxidization is a term you might have heard when dealing with something related to chemistry but luckily, here we don’t have to focus on the chemical aspects of oxidization. What we need to understand is that oxidization is what makes wine age but a fully oxidized wine means dead wine. Oxygen that is in the unfilled part of the bottle or makes its way into the bottle reacts with the wine. Partial oxidization is necessary but when too much oxidization takes place, the wine goes flat because wine’s aromas a volatile and air destroys them.

Factors that can cause undesired oxidization are high temperature and temperature fluctuations. High temperature acts as a catalyst and increase the rate of oxidization while temperature differential creates pressure differentials due to which more air makes its way in the bottle thus destroying the wine.

Humidity and Light

Another critical factor when it comes to storing wine is humidity. Most of the people believe that laying a wine bottle sideways protects the cork from warping and thus keeps it protected. It is true to an extent but what about the outer part of the cork? The outer part of the cork is at the mercy of humidity of the atmosphere in which the wine is stored. The relative humidity in which a wine should be stored in 50-70% because receding or exceeding these limits will have unpleasant consequences.

Another thing that might have caught your attention is that most of the wines are stored in colored bottles or the fact that they are stored in dark places during the aging process. It is because light can also affect wine and especially white wine is completely vulnerable to it. There is a term lightstruck that is used to define a situation where the wine’s taste has been ruined by overexposure to light.