Spring Cleaning, With Wine: Some Tips

Posted 04/22/2009 at 06:16 PM by Cathy

Note: This article ran in today's Gloucester Daily Times.


Spring cleaning.

Maybe you hate the effort. Maybe you love the satisfying after-effect.

Either way, right now is the time to shake things up in the house cleaning department.

For some people, that means airing out rugs dusty with winter salt, or vacuum-packing away their bulky winter sweaters.

For me, it means taking inventory of the wine I have in the house. If I find that I have more bottles than room in my small wine fridge, that means I am not opening enough bottles.

I am much more of a consumer than a collector; my idea of aging a wine is for the most part to come back to a glass of it every 15 minutes or so over the course of an evening to see how the aroma has evolved.

I do, nonetheless, have a very modest collection of bottles. As I looked through the shelves I noticed a Pinot Noir from Oregon that a trusted wine shop owner turned me on to a few years ago. "It's excellent to drink right now," he said. "But if you can hold out until 2009 it will be even better." I came home that day and literally taped a sticky note to the bottle that read, OPEN 2009.

That's the pleasure of being an enthusiastic wine drinker: incredible surprises are just one bottle – or one spring cleaning session – away.

If you don't yet have a wine collection at home, right now is a fantastic time to start. There are two very good reasons for doing this:

1) You're spring cleaning anyway, so you can easily clear away a space to store a few bottles. A friend of mine has for years stored his two or three cases of wine at the bottom of his closet, and that turns out to be a perfect place: it's cool, it's away from direct sunlight, it's someplace he looks every day and, since he drinks the wine often, his "inventory" turns over quickly.

2) There is no better time than right now to take advantage of the favorable quality to price ratio when it comes to wine. Butch McArthur of the Liquor Locker calls this "cherry-picking." Look especially for a winery second label, McArthur said, like 14 Hands from Washington state. A "second label" is when a major winery produces a line of wines that are separate from their premium and most well-known line; it's still great juice, but at a more value-oriented price.

Plenty of people are still wary of starting a wine collection. It starts, I suspect, with the word "collection," but for me a collection is anything more than one of something. Remember that three-for-$20 bin at the wine shop? Take advantage of it, and voila! You've started yourself a collection.

Here are a few other common questions when it comes to storing a collection of wine at home, and my responses to them:

• Do I have to store bottles of wine on their side, lying down?

If you plan to keep the wine for a while – at least for a few months, say – then yes, it's a good idea to store the bottle on its side. The purpose of tilting the bottle horizontally is to keep some of the wine in contact with the cork so that the cork doesn't dry out and shrink. A shrunken cork may allow air to enter the bottle, which could potentially damage the wine inside. Obviously, wines with screwcaps make the rationale for storing wine on its side obsolete.

The good news is that more and more wineries are turning to non-cork seals for their bottles, using either screwcaps or Stelvin closures. They eliminate the need for special shelving to keep the bottles horizontal.

• How long am I supposed to age a wine before I drink it?

The vast majority of wine purchased in this country is consumed within 24 hours of bringing it home. Wineries know this, which means many of them ship their wines ready-to-drink. Unless you collect and purchase wines with the intention of laying them down for several years, you don't need to worry about aging them. Just open and drink.

• Are there any special conditions for storing wine? Isn't there a particular temperature wines are supposed to be store at?

Wine is a perishable food, no doubt about it and sure, there is an ideal temperature to store it. (It happens to be 55 to 58 degrees.) The most important thing to remember is to avoid large temperature fluctuations, like leaving the wine in a warm car on a sunny day. Otherwise keep it cool and dry and stable – remember my friend's wine at the bottom of his closet – and you should be just fine.

E-Mail | Digg this! | del.icio.us
365 Days RSS | Comments RSS for this post

 

365 Days rss