Storing Wine

Deciding on Long-Term and Short-Term Shortage

Decide on which bottles of wine you want to store for the long term and which bottles of wine you want to store for the short term. Bottles of wine you should think of storing for the long term would be the exceedingly pricey and rare ones, whereas ideal short-term bottles would be ones you purchase at the supermarket for under $10.

Storing wine for the short-term

Short-term wine storage is quite easy. Keep your short-term wines away from areas of vibration (i.e. the top of the refrigerator), lay the bottles on their sides to keep the corks moist, and try to replicate one of the most important steps in storing wine for longer terms — keep the wine in a dark place with a moderate, stable room temperature (around 55 degrees). Plan on drinking your short-term wine within three to six months. Definitely do not store short-term wine in the sun, or any place near a heater.

Long-Term Storage

There are similarities between storing short-term wine and long-term wine. For long-term storage, you will also need to find a spot that is free of vibration, as well as one that hovers at around 55 degrees. Perhaps the most crucial difference with storing long-term wine is that it must be stored in a spot with a high humidity (70% or more). The reason for this is that the humidity will keep the cork from drying out, and it will also prevent evaporation of the wine. You should also not store long-term wine near any other foods or liquids, especially ones with strong aromas. Why is this? Because sometimes wines can pick up the aromas of certain canned or bottled foods and liquids - for instance, you definitely do not want to store a bottle of wine next to a bottle of vinegar in your pantry!

Once You've Opened a Bottle of Wine...

Once you have opened any bottle of wine, you should do your best to finish it in a short period of time. This doesn’t mean downing the entire bottle in one evening, but you should finish an open bottle within a week. Once a bottle is open, oxygen slowly begins to creep into the bottle (oxidation is the term for this process), and this will cause the degradation of the wine. If you drink a lot of wine, you may want to invest in a product called Vacu-Vin. Vacu-vin is a rubber cork stopper that holds a weak vacuum in the bottle with a few pumps from the hand pump that comes with the system. What this does is it creates a low-pressure environment, which eliminates a lot but not all the oxygen in the bottle.