A WINE FOR THE OCEAN WAVES

A wine expert and a fellow boaty share their tips on which bottles to take aboard, how to store them and most importantly, how to quaff them

A wine expert and a keen boater share their tips on which bottles to take aboard with you when you go cruising, as well as how to store them and most importantly, how to quaff them

Most boat owners I know seem to enjoy a good bottle of wine almost as much as they enjoy their boat, but until 2009, I hadn’t had the opportunity to combine these two pleasures myself. During the 1990s, I lived and worked in Hong Kong and would look down longingly from my office at the myriad of junks, motor cruisers and sampans coming and going in Victoria Harbour. I decided then and there that I wanted a boat, and came close to purchasing a Cheoy Lee cruiser. Sadly, I had to buy a new computer system for my business instead, and it wasn’t until I moved back to the UK in 2009 that I started looking at buying a boat again.

I’d always heard people say that whatever boat you buy, you’ll always want a bigger one, so I bought an Astondoa 43 Fly in an effort to avoid that regret. For a while, it worked, as my wife and I cruised around the south coast, France and the Channel Islands. Then one evening over a glass of wine, we started discussing what we wanted to do as we approached retirement. An idea began to evolve – we would take our boat down to Spain and cruise round the Med for two years, setting off from the UK in 2019. Given our new cruising itinerary, we realised belatedly that our Astondoa 43 still wasn’t big enough, and recently took delivery of a Prestige 550 flybridge.

A key part of boat life for us is enjoying good food and wine and entertaining guests on board. As chairman of Lunzer Wine Events, I’ve had the benefit of wine expert and founder Peter Lunzer to help me select wines that taste good but also keep well in the confines of a boat, so I asked him to share that advice with the readers of MBY.

Wine Storage

Storing wine at home is generally acceptable provided that the temperature swings aren’t too wide or too frequent. So a home kept at 22°C all year round is not perfect long-term storage, but wines will survive unharmed for many years. Temperature fluctuations are the killer. The air bubble in a bottle constantly expanding and contracting will cause even the most resilient of corks to give up the ghost. Screw caps are superbly resistant to these forces but even they can weaken over time. So storage on board a boat is not without problems.

In UK waters, keep wines close to the waterline, away from any engines. During the year, the gentle rise and fall in temperature will keep wines in a happy state. In the Med, the water temperatures are warmer and effort is needed with air-con to keep bottles unharmed. The upper limit for any wine, apart from Madeira, is 26°C.

Wine fridges are a great solution. The idea is that reds and whites can be kept at 12°C. When needed, it takes a little time in the fridge to cool the whites to 6°C or warm the reds to 18°C.

Motion is blamed for wine deterioration and in part, this can be true. If you stir chemicals, any reaction will happen quicker than if the liquid is static. The same is true of wine but here, speeding up the chemical reaction will increase the speed of maturation. Given the youthfulness of many red wines, it is no bad thing to give the maturation process a helping hand. Motion and wine sediment are not an ideal scenario so the red wines proposed below are not too old, nor likely to have easily disturbed sediment.

There is a theory that fizz will suffer most from movement but in our experience, Champagne and imitations are formidably resilient to deterioration.