But the room’s temperature is not staying as stable as I would like, and it seems to have damaged some of our wines. I have seen systems to control temperature and humidity available online starting at $500 and climbing to many thousands of dollars. What should we do?”
This question hits close to home — literally. I store my wines in a room in my basement that has no temperature or humidity control, and have done so for more than 20 years. The room gets a little too warm in the summer, and a little too cold in the winter. Yet a few months ago, I opened a handful of bottles I’ve stored the longest, including wines from the 1982, 1983 and 1985 vintages that I purchased upon release, and the wines showed very well. It was obvious that my less-than-ideal storage conditions had not damaged the wines in any way.
I have always suspected that wines in general are more hardy and durable than we are led to believe, especially by those who sell expensive cellars and cellar refrigeration equipment. And I suspect — don’t know for sure, but suspect — that the problems James experienced have more to do with how the wines were stored before he purchased them, or how they were transported, than by his cellar.
But I then turned to two other wine enthusiasts who had far more expertise than I did on the subject — Dennis Hall, former owner of Fairfield Wine in Beavercreek and longtime member of the American Wine Society, and Sunny Brown, former wine retailer who is now marketing and brand manager for Vanguard Wines wine distributor in Columbus — for their take. And they came through.
Hall recounted an experiment he conducted while he was operating the wine shop a few years back. He and a group of fellow enthusiasts chose multiple bottles of two California wines, one red and one white, and stored each under a wide variety of conditions, ranging from sitting in a kitchen window sill, to duct-taped to the side of a clothes dryer, to rolling around in the back of a minivan, to baked in an oven at 100 degrees for 24 hours. They kept two bottles as control bottles, one resting comfortably in the wine shop, one in a refrigerated wine cabinet.
When the wines were tasted after a year, only the window sill wine was undrinkable. The others tasted about the same.
Although Hall suspects that the other mistreated wines might have shown worse if the experiment had lasted longer than a year, his conclusion was clear: “Wines are definitely sturdier than we have been led to believe.” Most “big” wines, Hall said, can take a lot of mistreatment, which won’t immediately ruin the wines but which may shorten their life spans slightly.
Vanguard’s Brown agreed — up to a point. “But keeping any wine for an extended amount of time is a calculated risk, and everything a consumer can do to lessen those risks should at the very least be taken into account,” Brown said.
“Wine has a life span,” he said, “and much like saturated fats, excessive smoking and a lack of exercise may not necessarily hurt every human the same way, it is, statistically speaking, not a good way to prolong your life. Wine can be treated in the same manner.
Replace saturated fats with a warm temperature, excessive smoking with leaving the wines upright, and lack of exercise with ... Oh, you get the gist.”
Hadn’t thought of it that way.
Both Hall and Brown had some specific suggestions for our reader James that you can view on our Uncorked wine Web page at www.daytondaily news.com/go/uncorked, but I suggested James could buy a lot of wine with the money he would save by not buying a bunch of expensive refrigeration equipment.
He seemed to like that idea.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2258 or mfisher@Dayton DailyNews.com.
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