Ever notice on a particularly hot day that your wine bottles are leaking up through the corks?
Heat is one of wine's many enemies--along with light, vibration and neo-Prohibitionists. When the going gets hot, your wine could quickly go from tasty to nasty. How? Heat forces wine to lurch forward in its aging process in a decidedly ungraceful way. Even if your heat-exposed wine manages to escape immediate damage (the wine can have a "stewed" taste), it will usually start going downhill on a rapid rate. When that happens it's time to open that bottle and drink up!
Protecting wine from heat can be a challenge if you--like me--live in an older home, without air conditioning or even a nice cool basement for wine storage. One of these days I'll suck it up and buy one of those nifty temperature-controlled wine chillers, but until then, I'll just have to live with a few leaky bottles per year. (Anybody out there want to share their clever wine-storage ideas to help beat the heat?)
For more on the science and heartbreak of heat exposure, check out my latest column for Wine Review Online.
Bag-in-Box is always a solution. It protects your wine from all the nasty influences and keeps your wine fresh for weeks.
Posted by: Jane | June 09, 2009 at 06:09 AM