(live-PR.com) - Keeping wine at home

Irwen Martin offers advice on how to store wine

There are four key criteria for cellaring wine: constant temperatures and controlled humidity levels, a lack of light, and a lack of vibration. A failure to provide the right conditions in any one of these areas risks the wine being ruined.

If wine is not kept under controlled conditions, it will expand and contract frequently and this will lead to rapid deterioration. If corks are allowed to dry out their shape will change and oxygen will be able to get into the bottles and damage the wine. Too much light will allow ultraviolet light to destroy the wine and vibration will quickly damage the structure of the wine itself.

While one school of thought suggests that an underground cellar is the only place to store valuable wines, the truth is that few homes today have the space for a cellar. More to the point perhaps, is that it is now possible to provide the optimum storage conditions that were once only available underground, in other areas of the home.

Any wine, from a supermarket special offer through to a rare and expensive bottle of champagne, benefits from being kept at a constant temperature (around 10-14°C for most wines), and where the relative humidity is between 60% and 80%.

For these reasons, wine should not be kept in the kitchen or any other area where temperature and humidity levels can fluctuate widely, unless it is in a dedicated wine storage cabinet designed for use in such an environment.

There are specialist wine storage cabinets on the market that are suitable for kitchen use – we have a fine range ourselves – however storage capacity is often limited to around 50 bottles.

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Today, a wine cellar does not have to be underground. We provide freestanding wine cellar cabinets that just need to be plugged in. The larger models (which can store around 250-270 bottles of wine) provide a variety of temperature zones so that different types of wine can be stored safely, and antiuv glass protects the wines from the light. These are ideal for commercial catering locations such as
restaurants or wine bars where a wide range of ready-to-enjoy wines need to be at hand

These freestanding wine cellar cabinets can be used in the home too, but as they take up more space than a built-in cabinet, a little thought needs to go into where they are situated. Utility rooms, under-the-stairs, or in a garage or outbuilding are the usual sites for such cabinets,

The serious wine collector may want to convert free space in the home into a dedicated wine cellar and we can provide everything that’s needed for this, from shelving and doors through to wine conditioning units that can provide ideal storage conditions from 18 cubic meters through to 100 cubic metres.

Storing wine at home is much more popular than it was 20 years ago. The majority of consumers in the UK are perfectly happy with a small, dedicated wine cabinet to keep a few favourite bottles to hand, but a growing number are becoming more serious about their wine collections and are investing in purpose-built wine storage areas in their home.

For further information please contact:
The Wine Corner Company, Unit 4 Brunel Close, Harworth, Doncaster, DN11 8QA Tel: 01302 757047
Email: info@winecorner.co.uk Web: www.winecorner.co.uk

For a high res images of wine storage systems, please visit the Corner Press Centre website: www.cornerpress.co.uk