It is not enough to buy wine. You need to drink it too. The trouble is there is only that much wine you can drink before you stop being able to distinguish between beautiful wine and battery water. What you need then is to store your wines safely and securely for a more suitable time later or till the hangover is over?whichever is first.
While storing whisky and vodka are no brain-teasers, wine, in that sense, is like a high-maintenance model: cranky, moody, fragile, sharp… and that?s just the good things I am talking about. It needs care, love and affection. You can?t just buy it an impersonal gift. You have to truly show you care. You have cuddle it and talk to it, put it to sleep and then check on it from time to time if it needs anything.
Chauvinism aside, think of young wine like a big bear before the winter season; it needs to hibernate. The better the place of sleep, the more rewarding it will be. You can end up spending millions just to create a wine-friendly storage environment, but the logic should always be this: spend no more than a fraction of what your wine stock is worth. Decide a comfortable percentage as a logical spend and then stick to it.
The easiest thing to do is buy a wine cellar and put the wines in it. These look like fridges, but with loads of attitude and sobriety. The good thing about these is that they do not send vibrations through the inside body of the holding cabinet, thereby reducing shock on the wines stored inside. Keeping wine in a regular fridge is not advisable for this very reason; the constant vibrations make the wine uneasy. The bad thing is that wine fridges can be expensive, so unless you have that kind of wine references in your cellar, which require serious ageing, don?t bother. If you wish to pull a Angus MacGyver, the protagonist of the television series MacGyver, just get a regular beaten-up fridge, pay the electrician to have the compressor unit removed and placed besides the cabinet outside it in order to muffle and eliminate the vibrations.
A slightly more adapted way (and this is what I do) is this: get a nice, big, airy wooden cupboard. Store wines in it and make sure it is never too dry. This can be done by keeping a wet wad of cotton inside the cupboard, which should never be allowed to run dry. The cupboard should be in a place away from direct sunlight or any other source of heat. Normally, this can hold wine fairly well, wood being a bad conductor of heat.
The cupboard should be dark. Also, remember that wines like it dark, so don?t turn the lights on in between all your exchanges. It is what gears them up to shine when uncorked.
The next thing to note is that wines are generally stored on their bellies and this is for two reasons. By keeping the cork wet, we can ensure that it will keep the seal effective. Cork seals by expanding, something it cannot do when dry, hence the requisite of wetness. Keeping it wet also ensures that it doesn?t develop some fungus on its surface, which could spoil the wine. A dry cork also carries the risk of crumbling into the wine, which, too, isn?t desirable.
The jury is still out on the need to lay wine bottles with a screw cap. At the most obvious level, you would argue that there should be no need for such foreplay, but some purists think that there is more to posture than just a wet cork. In other words,
if you must err, do it lying down. Needless to add, this doesn?t hold for wines that come in a carton.
The temperature for storage should never be too low or high, but, more importantly, you need to watch out for fluctuations of temperature over short periods of time, as that is the most detrimental thing for a wine?s quality.
Among the things that spoil wine, oxygen is number one. It oxidises wine. A little oxygen aerates the wine and brings out the aromas, but a little more than needed and it starts wrinkling on the edges. Bottles once opened, therefore, must be kept under refrigeration and sealed. Invest in wine closures, which can suck out the air from the bottle or the other kind, which insert some inert gas that sits on top of the wine surface, cutting out contact with oxygen. The safest bet still remains to drink it and not doodle with half-empty bottles.
Outside of this, wine is fairly hardy. It doesn?t and won?t spoil too easily no matter what you do, I assure you. The joy of wine is part-anticipation and part-consumption. Good storage can reduce the deviation between these two steps.
The writer is a sommelier