How To Age Wine Properly?

[Ishtvan]

Does anyone have any advice on this? I read that it should be 55-65 deg F, in a dark, damp place, on its side. That's great if you have a wine cellar, but what if you have an appartment with no air conditioning and it can get really hot? Is it better to let it sit in a cabinet that is perhaps too warm, or a refridgerator that is definitely too cold? Also, how much does the humidity matter?

[Komag]

You could buy a little dorm fridge and just set the temp very high

 

Also, Shadowspawn should know a lot about it - I'm not sure if he does it, but his D&D friend (who lives a couple miles from me) has a custom built wine cellar and I've heard them talking about it from time to time.

[Macsen]

Only one place is damp, dark and has the right temperature conditions to keep wine - your stomach.

[sparhawk]

If you keep it to warm it will go sour. I guess it would be better to keep it colder than keep it to warm I can ask my mother in law, because she is doing some wine and liquor on her own, but she has a proper cellar. Not a wine cellar, but the house is very old, so the cellar is quite usable for this.

[demagogue]

I think Komag meant warm for a refridgerator. 55-65 deg F is still pretty cool (13-18 degrees celsius); it's below room temperature. It sounds like an ok idea, even a fridge turned off would be better than just a cabinet, since a fridge is temperature sealed. On that note, maybe you could just put a seal on a cabinet so the sunlit warmer air doesn't affect it too much. (?)

Edited August 11, 2006 by demagogue

[Komag]

Well I think the heat will just go right through it over some time, perhaps many hours. If you kept a fridge, turned off, with an ice bag in there, you could replace the bag every few days or something. Little fridges are cheap though, like $60 or $80

[Ratty]

I used to spend quite a bit on nice wines when I went up to Napa and Sonoma. My friends would always hint that I should open some of the nice bottles occasionally and share them. Stingy old me told them no, I wanted to keep them and age them so that years later I would have these awesome wines. My oldest were a couple of bottles of fine 1981 Cabernet.

 

Of course I didn't know a lot about wine storage, or even which wines were good to age and for how long. Last year I finally opened them up. One after another ... vinegar.

 

Moral of the story: Actually I don't know. Don't store wine? Drink it while you have it? Friends are forever but wine, 10 years tops?

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, a mini-fridge sounds like a good idea. I guess if you made it too cold stuff could potentially phase-separate out of solution (don't know if there is anything in wine that would do this, but it's possible ).

 

What about the humidity? Is that a crucial factor or not so much? Why is the damp environment desirable? Could it be so that the cork swells a bit with absorbed moisture and is less permeable to air?

[lofaesofa]

You've got to take into account the type of wine. As Ratty experienced, there is a limit to ageing wines. Some wines are already aged for drinking and as such, leaving them for a year or more will not really do them any flavour favours. Many modern wines will be of the drink now sort, rather than mature later.

Edited August 12, 2006 by lofaesofa

[Dram]

Many modern wines will be of the drink now sort, rather than mature later.

 

Definately. Our friend had his 40th birthday party and he opened a 40 year old wine (yep, as old as him), everyone was reluctant to taste it at first, but bloody hell was it good tasting. I don't think anyone wanted to know the price tag lol..