How to store and preserve premium wine

How to store and preserve premium wine:

If you buy premium wine and keep it in your cellar, or even just in the kitchen, you’ll need to know how to store it best in order to preserve its flavor. Wine that is kept for a long time often gets better with age, so long as environmental conditions are ideal. Keeping a wine collection requires knowledge on how to best preserve your wine to make sure the flavors and aromas are best when you do choose to open the bottle. 

TEMPERATURE:

Keeping wine in an environment that is too warm can quickly destroy the chemical balance of the wine. Warm temperatures age the wine quicker; anything over 70 degrees will speed up the aging process too much and will full the aromas and flavors. Ideally, keep the wine cellar where your wine is stored between 45 and 65 degrees. While warm is bad, cold is just as bad. Lack of moisture in the air can dry out the corks, which will let too much air in contact with the wine itself. Wine that freezes can push the cork out.

A temperature controlled environment will probably suit your needs best if you intend to store wine for a long time. Temperature fluctuations can cause the liquid to expand and contract, which can cause seepage or push the cork out of the bottle. Consistency is key if you don’t want the wine ruined. 

DARKNESS:

Long term storage can be threatened by sunlight. UV rays, like heat, can prematurely age your wine. This is why you will almost never see clear wine bottles, but instead they are tinted so less light can get through to the wine. Light in your home from lamps, etc. should be ok, but it’s best to keep your bottles of wine in a dark room. 

SIDEWAYS STORAGE:

If you’ve ever been in a wine cellar or even seen a metal rack wine holder at the store, you’ll notice that they are built so that the wine bottles lay flat on their sides. This is great because the cork will always be in contact with the wine which prevents it from drying out and cracking, which can allow too much air into the bottle and ruin the flavor. 

NO MOVEMENT:

Keep your wine somewhere still where they are not in contact with vibrations. The top of your fridge or next to your AC unit it are perfect examples of bad places to keep wine. Constant vibration agitates the wine and will disturb the sediment that settles in red wine. 

Some of the best places to store your wine where it will maintain stillness, darkness, and temperature balance can include:

• A cool, not damp basement or wine cellar
• A small wine cooler 
• Vacant closet or storage area
• Cooling unit for wine
• Not your kitchen, laundry room, or boiler room

If you are spending a decent amount every year buying premium wine to store, you will want to consider preserving your investments by putting money into a decent storage area for your collection.

What makes premium quality wines?

What makes a premium quality wine?

Anyone who has ever explored the wine aisle at the grocery store or the wine selection at a liquor specialty store has come to find that there can be a vast price difference. Depending on your budget and tastes, you can spend between six and six thousand dollars on a bottle of wine. Most people aim for something in the middle, but why is there this disparity? What makes some wine so much more expensive and better tasting than other wines? 

Many factors go into making and producing high quality wine and those factors are typically responsible for the quality, and therefore price, of a bottle of wine. 

Age of the wine

As most people know, wine gets better with age. The longer the wine sits without being opened, the more it’s flavors change and evolve. Not necessarily every wine benefits from aging, but a wine that is well aged has less acidity and fewer tannins, so the wine becomes smoother to drink. 

There are sometimes years that are better than others, but overall most people agree that an aged wine is better. For example, you may pay $4 for a wine that was aged for about a year in French and American oak barrels. But a $900 wine may have been aged in new Bertranges French oak barrels for years. 

Location of the vineyard

Where the wine was created, produced and aged has a lot to do with it’s quality. The best wine-making grapes come from vineyards where the vines struggle to produce fruit and where the vines are grown on a hill with soil low in nutrients and close to a river. Napa Valley winemaker Aaron Pott has been quoted as saying “If you get it right in the vineyard, even a trained squirrel could make good wine.”

Some of the best vineyards in the world are in Napa Valley, California; Bordeaux, France; Mendoza, Argentina; Tuscany, Italy; Barcelona, Spain; and Yarra Valley, Australia. You can often tell off the bat that a wine will be good if it was produced in a vineyard in these areas. 

Balance of Wine Making

The winemaking process is where a lot of the first two factors can break down. “In the hands of an overzealous, tech-loving winemaker, beautiful grapes can transform into a wine that tastes like a mouthful of vanilla and butter with no hint of the natural goodness that came from the land.

For a wine to taste good, there has to be a good balance between the amount of:

• Acidity
• Tannins 
• Alcohol 
• Sugar 

All of these things greatly affect the flavor and aroma in the wine. A high quality wine should not overwhelm you with the taste of oakiness, butter, alcohol, sweetness or acidity. These wines should promote the natural flavor of the grapes, not mask them with stronger flavors. 

Many people think that all wines are more or less the same - just sweet grape juice with some alcohol. But a lot goes into making a premium quality wine. Once you taste one and look for ripe fruit flavors, spicing earth, notes of acidity and more, you’ll begin to see that each bottle is special.