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Wine Storage

By Kim Marcus

With wine, as with medicine, the key is first and foremost to do no harm.

As soon as you start buying wines for more than just drinking that same night, you should think about how to store them. You need to make sure your investment is protected and that your wines are allowed to mature properly.

Otherwise, you could end up with wine stacked throughout your home. And there’s no quicker way to destroy all those 90-point gems that you’ve lovingly bought at retail or auction.

Indeed, few environments are as potentially destructive as the normal environment we call home. With temperatures usually above 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and sometimes much higher, stacking up cardboard boxes in your hallway, closet or kitchen is not an option.

Let’s face it, there’s a bit of a fear factor surrounding the question of how to store wine. Perhaps this fear is due to mysteries inherent in wine, not the least of which is how it ages. There are certain attributes that can be identified in young wines that mark them for aging: firm tannins, rich fruit flavors and a balanced acidity – but there’s no magic formula stating that x times y will equal z.

When it comes to storing that wine, your goal should be to allow it to advance on as smooth a path as possible. A great wine, like a 1961 Latour or 1941 Inglenook Reserve Cabernet, is still just the product of the vineyard it came from and the winemaker who made it. Its destiny was sealed once it was corked – but it needs the passage of time to realize its full potential.

Thus, with wine, as with medicine, the key is first and foremost to do no harm. You already have the preservative qualities of alcohol on your side. Now all that you need to do is apply some time-honored norms and basic common sense to make sure your wines age properly.

For starters, instead of dwelling on the perils your wine may face, relax and close your eyes. Think of a cool night after a gentle autumn rain. All you need is a good sweater to keep yourself warm. The air is calm and humid, but not dank. Moonlight is diffused by a blanket of clouds, which helps keep the temperature from dropping too much more.

Transfer that climate to a controlled environment and you have almost ideal conditions in which to store wine. The decision you have to make is how you want to achieve that environment, and there are three basic alternatives: a completely separate and dedicated home wine cellar, self-contained refrigerated units or a rented storage space, such as those found in warehouse and wine shops throughout the nation.

"For wine storage, there is a lot of empirical evidence about what is good and what works," says Christian Butzke, an enologist at the University of California at Davis, one of the nation’s leading academic institutions for grape growing and winemaking. Butzke specializes in transferring academic findings to the outside world.

"It’s always a balance between all the different aging factors that are going on, and given the hundreds of years of experience storing wine at slightly lower than room temperature, there’s no reason to change that," Butzke points out.

Temperature is the most important aspect of wine storage, says Butzke, though there is little agreement on what defines the optimum. Instead, Butzke says a range between 50 and 60 degrees is the most commonly cited. Broader ranges, from 45 to 65 degrees, are also given, with 55 degrees as the closest thing there is to a "gold standard" for temperature.

If you store wine at lower temperatures, Butzke explains, bottles develop too slowly or not at all, thus negating the positive effects that aging can bring, such as bottle bouquet. On the other hand, you can accelerate aging at higher temperatures, but that runs the risk of masking the fruity and varietal characteristics of the wine. "It depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to store wine for 10 years, then 50 to 55 degrees should be your target. If you want to drink it a little sooner, you could try storing it at a slightly higher temperature," Butzke says.

At the extremes, if the wine in your bottle freezes, it can expand enough to push out the cork completely, while merely a month at temperatures higher than 85 degrees can be enough to damage its freshness and subtleties.

All this relates to a basic law of chemistry that is brought into play when considering how wine ages: for every 18-degree increase in temperature (10 degrees on the Celsius scale), chemical reaction times double, explains Butzke. That doesn’t mean, however, that a bottle of wine stored at 63 degrees will age exactly twice as fast as a bottle stored at 45 degrees, because thermal properties alone are not the only determinants of how wine matures. Wine is chemically complex, and hundreds of compounds interact in the aging process.

Another key element in proper wine storage is making sure that the temperature is as stable as possible. Annual and gradual temperature fluctuations within a 10-degree range pose little risk to your wine. Also, one six-hour spike of high temperature probably won’t cause any damage. But sudden and frequent spikes in temperature may prematurely age a wine through heating, or by allowing theeal the cork provides to become permeable. That’s because the liquid wine expands at a much greater rate than does the solid glass of the bottle itself.

At risk when that happens is the empty space between the wine and the cork itself. This space starts off oxygen-free during bottling, but it can fill with oxygenated air from the outside due to abrupt contractions and expansions that may force the cork itself to move. Aside from biological or chemical contamination, it’s oxygen that will deaden the taste of your wine faster than anything else, as it diffuses itself throughout the bottle. If wine is seeping out of your bottle, oxygen may well find its way in.

By the way, the measurement of empty space in the neck of the bottle is referred to as ullage. Some ullage is necessary, otherwise even small fluctuations of temperature would expand the wine enough to push the cork out of the bottle. But an ullage level that goes below the bottle’s neck may indicate improper storage, which is why ullage is used as a standard for determining the potential quality of aged wines.

"The reality is that stability is important. In a wine cellar you normally look at plus or minus one or two degrees during the day, but if you start seeing big fluctuations from day to night, physics tells you that glass expands and contracts, as well as the wine and the cork. In theory, it pulls air in and pushes air out," says Bob Orenstein, president of Dallas-based International Wine Accessories, which sells a variety of

wine cooling units, racking systems and other storage paraphernalia.

Then there’s the question of humidity. Too much, and mold can grow, which damages labels and the aesthetic appeal of the bottles themselves (although it should pose no health risk as long as mold atop the cork or around the bottle’s lip is cleaned off before serving). More seriously to the wine investor, damaged labels decrease the potential resale value of the marred bottles.

Too little humidity, and you might run the risk of damaging the cork by drying and shrinking it prematurely, thus allowing the ullage to increase – though the levels of dryness that would cause such damage are rare outside severe climates. However, this is an area of debate among wine connoisseurs, with some claiming that humidity shouldn’t be much of a worry under normal conditions. For now, it seems safe to err on the side of caution and keep your wine stored at no more than 80 percent relative humidity.

Another area of concern for many novice wine collectors is vibration. You can rest assured, it’s not an issue in most home wine cellars, according to Butzke. You don’t want to shake the wine too often (to avoid disturbing the sediment), but that’s about it. Vibration from a refrigeration unit or from storing wine underneath some basement steps shouldn’t be a worry.

Wine is put in colored bottles to counteract the potential aging and heating influences of sunlight. Some claim that fluorescent light, with its higher-frequency waves, is more deleterious to wine than incandescent light, yet there is no hard evidence either way. The best advice is to keep your cellar dark between visits.

Another rule of thumb is to keep the bottle stored on its side so the wine remains in contact with the cork. This is done to make sure the cork doesn’t dry out, but again, there’s no scientific evidence that this is necessary. A recent study even shows that it might be acceptable to store wine upright. For now, keep a bottle on its side – there’s no harm in sticking with convention here.

Thus, the ideal set of parameters – a cellar temperature ranging from 50 to 60 degrees, at around 70 percent relative humidity, with a minimum of vibration and light – defines the environment you’re trying to create in order to store your wine. Your wines will survive outside those ranges, but realize the further you stray, the greater the chances the wine may age poorly.

So what are your storage options? At the most basic level, you can build it yourself, and if you have a basement, you’re already more than halfway there. Whether or not you’re interested in this method, a good all-round resource for general knowledge is the bible of home wine cellar construction: How and Why To Build a Wine Cellar, a self-published book written by Richard Gold, a retired psychology professor from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Gold has sold 24,000 copies of the book since its first edition in 1983. He emphasizes passive cellar techniques, which utilize the average ground temperature as a basis for heating or cooling the cellar. This passive method minimizes the use of air conditioning and maximizes the use of natural and man-made insulating materials.

An important part of any non-passive home cellar system is the cooling unit. Such units not only help to keep the temperature constant, but can also reduce excess humidity levels.

Again, the warm air produced by the unit needs to be vented outside the cellar, but no special electrical or plumbing connections are required. One of the leading manufacturers of refrigeration units is Breezaire. The company sells a range of units, mostly wall-mounted. Breezaire units also include noise-reduction systems, high-temperature alarms and even probes to measure the temperature inside a test bottle of wine for the most accurate cooling control.

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