Jeroen van Mierlo teaches wine courses, in which he explains people the basics about wine. He answers the most asked questions about wine: ”How should I properly store my wine”.
How to store your wine?
Storing wine properly is of great importance. If you store your wine in a wrong way, it will go bad and of course we want to avoid big disappointments when opening a bottle. Wine is influenced by light, temperature, and oxygen. Therefore there are certain ‘rules’ to storing your wines. Check out all tips to store your wine!
- Reseal your wine with a bottle stopper or even better a vacuum seal.
- Store the wine in a dark place.
- Unopened wines are best stored lying down
- Opened wine bottles are best kept standing
- Keep the temperature constant of about 12 degrees Celsius.
- Avoid big temperature changes.
- Let the wines rest, don’t move them about too often.
How long can you keep an opened bottle of wine?
In general you can keep an open bottle of wine about 1 or 2 days after opening. This is when you seal the bottle properly after pouring. We recommend to store the wine at a low temperature, so if you don’t have a basement or special wine climate cabinet, the fridge is your best option. This also goes for red wines. When a wine is stored in a warm space the quality and taste will decrease even faster.
Once opened, make sure you store your wines standing up. It’s the oxygen that influences the taste of the wine. When a bottle is laying down, the surface becomes bigger and therefore oxidation goes faster.
To slow down oxidation it is advised to remove as much air from the bottle as possible. This is very easily done with the Vacu Vin Wine Saver. The Wine Saver creates a vacuum seal, which makes your wine last for about 7 to 14 days!
Which wines can you store for a longer period of time?
The time over which you can store a wine without the taste decreasing depends on among others the grape, the production process and the bottling. It is safe to say that wine you buy in a supermarket is not meant to be saved for longer than 1 or 2 years.
Then there are certain storage wines, or as the French call them ‘Vin de Garde’. These wines are specially produced to be stored for a long time. They keep evolving when they are in the bottle. Often these wines won’t taste too nice in the first few years after bottling. To really balance the flavour they need to sit in the bottle and breathe through the cork. Storage wines are often red wines. White wines can usually not be saved as long as red wines as they have less tannin.
Rose and sparkling wines can generally not be stored very long. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but most of these wines you can best consume within 1 or 2 years.