While this won’t hurt your wine at all, you’ll need to warm it up before drinking so you can get the flu impact of its delicate flavors.
Pro Tip: Your standard refrigerator is designed for food storage and is typically kept at 38 degrees - too cold for wine. A good wine cooler will allow you total control over the temperature, so you can adjust it to the perfect temperature for serving when you’re ready to finally open up your collection for drinking. If you don’t have an underground cave or even a regular basement, you can easily store your wine bottles in a dedicated wine refrigerator. Wine lasts for a longer period when kept at 55 degrees - compare that to today’s standard room temperature of 68 to 72 degrees, and you can see why a cellar is appealing.
Because the temperature just below the earth’s surface stays at a steady 53 to 57 degrees year round, it’s the perfect place to keep wine cool for long-term storage. In the days before refrigeration, wine was stored underground to keep it cool and reduce temperature fluctuations. You don’t need a wine cellar to store wine effectively, but you should try to mimic the conditions of an old-fashioned grotto. Think of this as the one exception to a general rule that you should drink your wine within two years of the expiration date. Wine lovers make sure they provide the perfect storage conditions to allow the finest wines to develop their best flavor over the years. These tend to be expensive, and you can’t just ignore them to age them properly. When someone talks about aging a fine wine, they generally mean rich, red wines - think Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot - that are designed to get more mellow over time. In general, if you spent less than $30 for the wine, you should drink it within a year or two of purchase at most - and preferably right away! These aren’t bad wines by any means, but they aren’t typically the kind that get better with age, either. It should be noted that most wines are meant to be drunk shortly after being bottled, while they’re at the peak of flavor and aroma.
When grapes are fermented into wine, yeast is added to break down sugar and convert it into alcohol. That’s the whole point of fermenting the grapes and allowing the alcohol to develop in the first place.
Wine is designed to last for a long time, after all. In general, an unopened bottle has a much longer shelf life than an opened one. More information on decanting and pouring fine wines can be found in our Serving Wine guide.The answer to this question depends on two main factors: the type of wine and the storage conditions it was subjected to.
It is Society policy to bring any such discrepancy immediately to the attention of members who hold stocks of the wines concerned in our Reserves facility.Ĭlick here for additional drink date information, including how to interpret The Society's drink date notes, ageing wines, and when to open wines with long drinking windows.ĭon't hesitate to contact the Fine Wine advice team with any concerns you may have about drink dates. Occasionally, maturity will set in more quickly than predicted and reduce the expected lifespan of the wine. In optimum conditions of temperature control and humidity such as those prevailing in our Stevenage cellars, end dates can often be exceeded, and drink-from dates may occasionally jump the gun slightly. Because domestic storage options range from deep cellars to the custom-made racks that some kitchen designers still insist on putting next to the oven (!), our drink dates tend to err on the safe side. All Society wines come with recommended drink windows, based on vintage conditions, our buyers' expertise and our producers' understanding of how their wines evolve.