Your Wine cellar

When your wines are purchased your must store them in an appropriate place to have the mat hand when the occasion arises to open a bottle selected by yourself and to enjoy it in the company of a few friends, or in a tête-à-tête for a celebration.

But a wine cellar is also necessary to enable wines to mature if they are too young or still closed. It is maturation in the wine cellar that gives wine its optimal quality.
Unfortunately wine cellars that can be used to store prestigious wines are too rarely planned by architects and builders.

Not just any room can be used as a wine cellar. You must be very careful about the direction and hygrometry, protect the room from smells, light, vibrations and changes in temperature.

If you can choose the room to be used as a wine cellar, choose a room with a north exposure if possible, as the power of the sun rays will have less impact.  You should also choose a room far from any source of heat (boiler, garage).

If the room has a window or a dormer window, cover it so that the light cannot pass through it (ultraviolet sun rays cause wine to age prematurely).  When possible avoid being too close to a road. Vibrations caused by moving vehicles are harmful to the proper preservation of stored bottles.

The perfect room for storing wine has a dirt floor, which is a true hygrometry regulator. Another solution is a box of sand in a corner, which should be regularly moistened in order to preserve the necessary and beneficial humidity.

The ideal relative humidity is from 70 to 85%.  This prevents the corks from drying, and thus avoids any exchange of gas between the wine and the surrounding air.  It also protects the labels from being altered by mildew.

The temperature is also very important.  A very cold wine cellar might be very good for the preservation of wines, but wines remain blocked by the cold and do not mature. On the other hand, if the wine cellar is too warm the wine can mature too fast, and lose some finesse.

But the most important thing is to have the smallest possible variations in temperature between the maximum and minimum temperatures.  The average temperature of the wine cellar should be somewhere between 10° and 14°.

If all of these conditions are combined, you can have a good wine cellar.  But it is not enough to have the room.  You must know how to manage your supply of wine.

You must know wines, how they mature, by tasting them from time to time.  The ideal solution is to keep a log of your wine cellar.  In this way you can keep track of the maturation of wines and take into account the potential aging of each wine.

Some wine should be drunk right away, when they provide such great olfactive pleasures with their floral scents and typical fruity flavors.  Others, several great wines to be kept on hand, can be preserved for 20 or 30 years, or sometimes even more.

But keeping very old bottles involves certain risks, the corks for example. Corks must be changed approximately every 20 years.

Bottles must be kept lying flat, in head to foot position if the bottles are identical.