Storing Wine

Wine is best kept at a temperature of 13°C (55°F) but will not come to much harm if your cellar (or cupboard) goes down a few degrees in winter or goes up to 15.6°C (60°F) in summer. Temperatures must, however, be kept reasonably constant and if you freeze your wine in winter and boil it in summer, you can hardly expect to get much more than an intoxicating liquid out of the bottle, or perhaps only vinegar. If you can control your cellar, there should be ventilation of some sort, but no great harm will come to the wine if there is not. This has been proved by the well-authenticated stories of fathers who traditionally wall-up a specially stocked cellar of wine on the birth of their first-born son, to be opened after he comes of age, or later.

In some places, like Limberg in southern Holland, this kind of thing has been going on for some hundreds of years, so we may take it that if ventilation had much to do with the keeping quality of wine, the practice would have stopped a long while ago. The next point to remember is that wine must always lie on its side and the reason for this is twofold. In the first place, the wine should cover the cork and keep it moist. This stops it shrinking and thus helps to stop air entering the bottle. If there were a space between the cork and the wine, this would certainly be a breeding ground for the kind of microbe that would start trouble in the wine. Second, this allows any sediment or crust to settle in the bottom of the bottle while it is resting.

There have been many tragic tales on this subject. The best way to store your wine is in bins, if you have a cellar, or in simple wire racks. They can be made in any size to fit whatever space you have available, and if you like they can go up in steps to fit in a cupboard under stairs. Alternatively, for a small yearly charge of £4.50 per case 12 bottles, allow Barrels and Bottles to store your wine in optimum conditions for you.

With your wine in reasonable condition, it can be prepared and served, and this is the moment which the wine lover has long awaited.