So, my 40 bottle wine cooler is currently maxed out, and thanks to the last two months of allocations buying and auction finds, I have about 50 more bottles on the way.
I would totally go out and get a bigger cooler, but I’m planning on remodeling my kitchen in the next one or two years and plan to include a built in eurocave or vinotemp which will hold 150-200 bottles.
The coolest spot in my home is the bottom of a guest room closet which stays extremely consistent at 69 - 70 degrees, and has been that way all summer. Might cool a couple degrees in the winter. I’m thinking of keeping the midterm storage wines in there - like the 2014 and 2015 Bedrocks and Carlisles that weren’t too expensive, but that I’ll let sit 1-5 years.
I’ll be keeping the wines in their styro shippers, but how long do you think I can safely keep wines in the closet before I start seeing adverse effects?
Is this a bad idea? The alternative is to convert a cheap fridge and store in the garage.
For zins to be consumed within 5 years you have no worries. I have had worse storage conditions in years gone by and very little problem (none that I recall) with fuller bodied reds.
In shipping boxes at 69-70 degrees is perfectly fine for just about anything and for many years. At least in my observation and opinion.
If you stored some identical bottles in your wine cooler unit and in that guest room closet for the next five years and did a blind tasting, I’d be pretty surprised if you could (a) tell the difference between which one was stored where and (b) preferred the one stored in the wine cooler. I’d love it if the CEOs of Eurocave, Vinotemp and Le Cache had to take that blind test.
So don’t stress about it. Oh, and as you learned this time around (and as 100% of wine enthusiasts do about their first wine cabinet), whatever capacity you think you’re going to need, you’re actually going to need a lot more than that. The difference between 55 degrees and 69 degrees, to whatever extent there is one, is probably only going to appear if you are storing the wine for decades. But if you’re on a program of storing wine for decades, 40 or 150 bottles isn’t going to make sense. Think about buying even a small number of long-term storage wines (Barolos, Bordeaux, Grand Cru Burgs, etc.) per year to hold for decades, and how quickly that will overtake a 150 bottle cabinet. And of course, you probably won’t end up only buying a small number per year every year.
Good to hear. I’m sure I’ll eventually outgrow even a 150 bottle cellar, but I don’t see the need (for me) to keep over 150 bottles on site. If I overflow that (and my wife doesn’t confiscate my wallet), there’s some good choices for offsite storage in Southern California.
I just returned from a trip into the near future. I copied and pasted this post from WB:
How long would you store at 70 degrees?
Post #8,294 Post by Eric S n y d e r » April 30, 2018 11:22 pm
So, my 40 bottle and 150 bottle wine coolers are currently maxed out, and thanks to the last two years of allocations buying and auction finds, I have about 95 more bottles on the way. Looking ahead, the 2017s are being released this fall and next spring, and as everyone knows, 2017 is the vintage of the century.
The coolest spot in my home is the bottom of a guest room closet which stays extremely consistent at 69 - 70 degrees, and has been that way all summer. Might cool a couple degrees in the winter. I’m thinking of keeping the midterm storage wines in there - like the 2015 and 2016 Bedrocks and Carlisles that weren’t too expensive, but that I’ll let sit 1-5 years.
I’ll be keeping the wines in their styro shippers, but how long do you think I can safely keep wines in the closet before I start seeing adverse effects?
Personally, I would not. In fact, that was close to the condition I was able to maintain at my previous house. which led me to paying for offsite storage. But I can not say that there would be any actual problems with the wine. Just that for me, i worried too much about it.
I like the general tone of the advice above (i.e., not to panic); but I would say that storing for long periods (say, more than a few months) at 70 degrees will likely cause the wines to develop faster in a a noticeable way than they would stored at 55-60. I have a stash of wines I plan to drink within a year, and for those I just keep them in a relatively cool place (but they do see 70-75 in the afternoons of warm days. For anything that I plan to keep longer than that, I move those to my locker.
So, while I think the above comments that the wines will be fine are correct, I also think that they will be a little different than if they were stored at 55. Doesn’t mean worse, just different.
I did a two year experiment several years ago with three bottles each of 3 wines, two white and a red. One bottle of each was in the 53 degree wine cellar. One was in the basement that fluctuated from 54-72 during the year. One was in the living area that fluctuated from 60-78 during the year. After 2 years we did a blind tasting (nobody knew which bottles were which, as my wife bagged and labeled them). There was a barely noticeable advancement of the 60-78 bottles. Nobody could tell the difference between the wine cellar bottles and the basement bottles.
Not incredibly scientific, but it did make me a little less paranoid.
I’ve done accidental experiments with wine at warmer temps for much longer than a few months or even a year. The wines were OK. Would they have been better had they been stored differently? Who knows.
What I would mention however, is that the wine itself matters a little bit. Cleanly made wine that’s been stabilized is likely to do better than a wine where you don’t know what’s going on. Maybe not for the period or the temp range you’re talking about, but at some point the reason people do what they do when making wine is going to justify itself.
And seriously - before you decide on the size of fridge you want to get, look at the dimensions. Based on what you gain, the floor space you lose isn’t going to be significant between a 150 and a 200 or maybe even 250 bottle fridge, assuming you get one that stands upright rather than horizontally.
I’ve opened a number of bottles over the past few year that were in my “drink soon” stash at room temperature (65 in winter to 74 in late spring, summer, and a good bit of fall in the hot, humid Deep South) and almost all of them have been fine, despite many having spent from 15 to 20 years in that condition. Yes, it sometimes takes me a decade or more to get to “short-term” wines. I wouldn’t worry too much about your storage.
Brett likes 68F and above, but that really is not your fault. If it was sterile filtered/crossflowed you’d have little to worry about. But still, 62F is nicer.
It’s what I was getting at above. Seventy isn’t all that bad but if it gets warmer, the wine is going to be more affected if it’s an old-school funky wine than it would be if it were a different kind of wine.