Aging Well

Properly store wines that need to rest and mature.

We had such a delicious bottle of wine at the restaurant last evening, I’m thinking of buying a case. The main consideration, though, is where we would store a dozen bottles safely. What conditions does a case of wine require in order to keep those bottles tasting as good as the one we enjoyed yesterday? If you live in a house, the choices for wine storage are usually wide. Check out wine storage structures on the web and you will find seemingly endless possibilities. If you live in a spacious apartment, the choices remain reasonably large. If you live in a small apartment, however, possibilities narrow considerably. Yet with some creativity and ingenuity, you can construct a satisfactory, albeit limitedsized, wine cellar even in a constricted space.

The refrigerator? Only for white wines and, then, only for a limited time.

Wherever it may be, a good wine cellar requires a quiet, dark place with a cool and reasonably even temperature, ideally about 50–55 degrees Fahrenheit, relative humidity of about 65 to 70 percent and with little or no traffic.

A rarely used closet, for example, would be fine except if that closet is in the kitchen. With the room’s daily changing temperature and traffic, it can be, in fact, one of the less ideal places to store wine.

Once you settle on the space, place the wines on their sides so the liquid will reach the cork, keeping it wet and, thus, swollen. A wet cork keeps air out of the bottle — air is an enemy to resting, aging wine. You say that’s not a problem for you because you buy wines with metal closures? Sorry, but those wines are generally not meant to improve with aging. Enjoy them now while you are waiting for your special bottles to mature.

And if you can construct the perfect place to store and age your wine, how long will those bottles — particularly great red wines — last? It depends on the wine, of course, but possibly, in some cases, almost as long as we will.