Wine storage options
If you want to keep more than a few bottles of wine in your home, or even store and archive some wines, you'll soon run into a space problem. Wine, in short, is a bit of a space-hungry hobby. However, there are several options for storing your wine appropriately and neatly so that it looks nice while still having the right conditions and being on hand for consumption.
Bottles with cork caps must be placed in storage so that the cork is wetted by the wine and does not dry out. Different types of wine racks are well suited for short-term storage. Wine racks are not only used to store wine bottles safely, but they also serve an aesthetic function, fitting into any interior thanks to the myriad sizes, shapes and materials used. Also very modern are the various wall-mounted wine holders, where we can place mostly a smaller number of bottles, and at the same time function as a decoration. Here, however, we must be careful of temperature and sunlight, which can spoil the wine if stored for a long time. For this reason, we do not recommend them.
The natural environment for wine is, of course, the cellar. This is not a contrivance to make wine more interesting, but a very practical thing. In a properly adapted cellar, it is easy to create conditions that allow wines to be kept for longer periods of time. It is all about a constant temperature (ideally between 10 and 12 °C), the right humidity, avoiding direct exposure to light and various strong odours, the possibility of placing the bottles in a horizontal position, limiting frequent handling of the bottles and, above all, space. It does not have to be the cellar that we know from the winemakers of South Moravia and that we would all like to have. The more fortunate can use a classic cellar under the house or rent a cubicle for storage, which is now offered by many wine shops.
A good solution for storing wines in an apartment or house without a cellar is a special refrigerated cabinet - a home wine cellar. Wine cabinets also vary in capacity and then in various technical conveniences. Some have different temperature zones from red wines to sparkling wines, so that when you take the wine out of the cabinet you can serve it directly. As with all electronics, it's worth taking a few minutes to search for reviews and choose not just on price.
On the other hand, conventional fridges are not really suitable for storing wines. The fridge we normally have in our kitchen at home is good for chilling wine before consuming it directly or for shorter-term storage for two or three bottles. It is mainly the vibrations that are harmful to the wine there, there is also the risk of odours from the outside penetrating through the cork from other foodstuffs and, last but not least, the wine takes up a lot of space in the fridge and its placement among the salami and cheese is not entirely dignified.
