To store your wine

Unlike the grapes on the vines that are searching for sun and bright light, the finalized wine requires absolute darkness. A wine should mature in a dark and cool place, free from vibrations and strong odors (oil, gasoline and chemical products in the garage). Ideally, a wine cellar should be reasonably moist, sufficiently ventilated but free from cross-sections. One of the most important things to achieve a good result, is that the wine is not stored in a place where the temperature varies a lot and too often. If you do not have access to an underground cellar, there are now wine cabinets to buy in different sizes. It is not as charming, but the advantage is that you can create ideal conditions in terms of temperature.

Creating your wine cellar :

A good wine cellar should at best respect several different criteria; it should be able to close, it should be dark, be protected from noise, from strong odors and it should be protected from cross strokes. However, the cellar must be well ventilated with a humidity of 75%.

The temperature should be stable, if possible around 11-12 °. This is what one might call the ideal conditions that unfortunately are rarely fulfilled in reality. There are therefore some tips that you can use to improve the conditions for the storage of your wine. If one e.g. has no ventilation, you can open new holes with valves in the wall. If you do not have enough moisture, you can set a bucket of water on the cellar floor with charcoal in to raise the humidity.

If, on the other hand, the air in the cellar is too humid, you can lay pebbles on the floor or also increase the ventilation. There are also moisture removers to buy in well-stocked hobby shops. Excessive humidity in the cellar should not be neglected. The problem with moisture is that both the labels and the corks rot. For the label it doesn’t matter much, but if the cork rots, the wine will be bad and undrinkable.

If the temperature varies between summer and winter (up to 10 °), it does not do much. The most important is that the temperature in the cellar is stable and does not vary on a daily basis. If you have a basement that varies a lot in temperature, you can insulate the walls to reduce the variation. It is also not advisable to store the wine next to a heating boiler that creates both heat and vibration.

To decorate the wine cellar :

The bottles in a wine cellar must be ranged rationally and functionally in order to be easily found and to have a good overview of the holdings when you start to increase the number of bottles. Today, there are many types of functional shelves that you can buy both in wood and in metal.

You can also make homemade shelves. If you choose wood as a material, it is important not to have too high humidity, as the wood will rot. The most important thing for the interior of the wine cellar is to get a thermometer and a hygrometer to have control over the conditions in the cellar.

To range the bottles :

White wines should be placed closest to the floor, the red ones on top. Storage wines are placed at the back, closest to the wall, i.e. in the least accessible spaces. Wines that are ready to drink should be placed most readily available.

Buying wine to start up a wine cellar

Starting up a wine cellar requires a certain sense of order and organization. First you should think about what budget you want to spend on the wine and what size you have in your wine cellar. You should also think about how many bottles you drink on average per year.

In order not to get caught up, you should then buy wines that do not have the same shelf life. Finally, you should vary your selection so you have wines that suit different occasions and different dishes. Under another heading here on IVINIO, you will find suggestions for wine cellar combinations that should suit different sizes and budgets.

Wine to drink or wine to store ?

2 rules are important when talking about wine storage. The first is that a basically mediocre wine remains mediocre even when it has been stored. A simple wine becomes undrinkable if it is stored because it basically does not have the structure to be able to be stored. The second rule is that very few wines can withstand storage exceeding 5 years. When you mention wines that are stored for 10-20 years, you talk about high quality wines that have a structure to handle such long storage.

Therefore, if you want to buy wine from a vintage that symbolically means something important and that has to be stored for a longer period (eg the child’s year of birth, the year of the wedding, etc.), you should take into account that it corresponds to a larger investment. These wines are often quite expensive, but it is definitely worth investing in a couple of bottles that you can enjoy on more festive occasions. What happens if I store a wine for too long and how do I notice that? Well, it is actually noticed right away, the taste loses its harmonious and aromatic character. The wine becomes flat and loses all charm. In some cases, it simply becomes undrinkable. In these cases, you can take comfort in the fact that the wine can be used for cooking. In general, we can state that wines today are produced so that they mature faster than they did about 20 years ago.

Even stricter Burgundy wines that required 7-8 years of storage can be drunk today after only a few years. The reason is that we consumers, want to be able to drink what we buy as soon as possible and the winegrowers have adapted their production with the modern production methods. At IVINIO, we recommend the storage time for all our wines to make it easier for you and to avoid that any wine is “forgotten” in the future.

So why storing wine? Well, sometimes when buying “primary wines”, i.e. wines that were harvested in the fall before, the wine can appear to be rough. It is often the tannins that have not had time to be “rounded off” and the wine then needs time to round off the overly aggressive tannins. Another sign of an immature wine is that it feels “green” or a bit like when you eat an unripe fruit. The wine also needs to mature then. Younger wines can also sometimes give a slightly sparkling feeling on the tongue. It is then often the fermentation of the wine that continued after it was completed and that created a small dose of carbonic acid.

When should you drink your wine? In fact, it is not so easy to give any general rules. Wines ripen very differently and the shelf life can generally vary from one up to twenty years. Really great quality wines can actually be stored for decades without being destroyed, but that is quite unusual. Many factors come into play to determine the storage potential of a wine; the grape variety, the region it comes from, the soil and the manufacturing process.

The temperature in the wine cellar also plays a big role. The higher the temperature at which the wine is stored, the faster the storage process and the shorter the time the wine can be stored. In addition, the vintage also plays a role. Wine is not like many other drinks an industrial product that can be made the same, year in and year out. Some vintages, for exactly the same wine, can be stored longer than others that develop much faster. Below you will find a guide that makes it easy to get an insight into how the harvest has been in the last decade in France. The rating scale is given from 1 to 20 where 20 corresponds to the best vintage

	Alsace	Beaujolais	Red Bordeaux	Red Burgundy	White Burgundy	Champagne	Jura	Languedoc-Roussillon	Red Provence	Red South-west	Red Loire	Rhône
2000	12	12	18	11	15	15	16	16	14	14	16	15
2001	13	11	15	13	16	9	14	16	14	16	13	11
2002	11	10	14	17	17	17	17	12	11	15	14	9
2003	12	15	15	17	18	14	13	15	13	14	15	14
2004	13	12	14	13	15	16	17	15	15	13	14	16
2005	15	18	18	19	18	14		15	12	16	16	18
2006	12	12	14	14	16	15		15	16	13	10	15
2007	16	14	14	12	13	13		16	14	12	12	18
2008	14	14	15	14	15	16		15	12	13	15	14
2009	15	18	18	17	16	15		15	14	18	17	18
2010	14	16	18	16	17	14		17	14	15	17	17