How to store and preserve your wines...

Storing wine in certain conditions will affect the way the wine ages, and depending on the length of storage time, it can improve it or ruin it. The key factors in storage are temperature, light and humidity. While warmer conditions accelerate the maturation--ageing--process, colder temperatures slow it down. Removing the solids from a young wine by heavy filtration also accelerates its ageing. If you buy wine more than a bottle or two at a time, you need to think of a proper place to store them. While having your wine close to your kitchen or dining room might be convenient, it's not really the best place for them, even if you have a wine rack. There are exposed to light and there are high and fluctuating temperatures in the vicinity of the kitchen. A closet in a northern exposure room--usually your coolest place in the house--might be a better alternative. That's, of course, assuming you don't have a basement. And always, even for short time, store the bottles horizontally and make sure the cork is wet, so that it doesn't dry out and allow in oxygen--yes, wines breath... Another problem with storing wine in the vicinity of the kitchen is the presence of strong smells, depending, of course, on the type of cooking you do. We love smells, especially of ethnic foods, but wines don't. Treat them with respect.

In my case, a wine rack built under the stairs of our house in Indiana as I was starting my wine collection served me well until I moved to Arizona where there are no basements and no cool places to store wine. Moreover, the number of wines had increased along with the commitment to preserve them as well as possible. I had to find something suitable and quickly. I was able to locate the supplier of EuroCave, self-contained wine cellars that recreate the natural cooling environment of a château wine cellar. I was thrilled with this discovery, as was not aware that such things existed, and rushed to buy one of their units that could hold about 250 bottles. It was like Christmas when the unit arrived! Finally the wines had their first proper home.