Wine okay in the freezer? No?
A friend recently asked about wine storage conditions. This is something I’m faced with myself as we prepare to move into a Federal Hill rowhouse. It isn’t a terribly big deal since most of my wine sleeps in a temperature controlled warehouse in California, but I wouldn’t want to torture the wines I keep in the house.
The current word is that 55 degrees with some measure of humidity is where you want your wines to be. That’s how most professional storage facilities do it.
The real lesson, though, is that big temperature variation kills. 50 is okay, just a little cold. 80 is okay, just a bit more on the warm side. Going between 50 and 80 daily (or weekly or whatever) is bad because the corks will expand and contract letting in air and possibly allowing wine to leak.
Temperature ages wines faster. A wine stored at 80 will age faster than one stored at 55. It won’t though, age for the better (so don’t put the ’03 Lafite in your microwave).
Unless you’re stocking up on Bordeaux to lay down for 20 years, most of this doesn’t matter all that much. If you’re drinking within a year, it’s fine. Leave it on the counter or on the basement. Just store the bottle on its side (screwcaps exempt).
Another wine-dork consensus is that heat will “cook” a wine. While there’s no doubt that wine stored at the top of a metal warehouse in Texas will taste like garbage (this happens to some great wines imported from France), I am on the side that wine is more tolerant to heat than people think. I’ve read message board posts from a guy who puts wines in his trunk in the summer then drinks them just to agitate the wine-dorks who automatically say wines over 80 degrees will be “flawed.”
So the lesson is to drink up as quickly as possible and enjoy.
