#AgeYourWine! This is a hashtag I use in numerous tweets to try and promote bottle aging. Many wines, both red and white, deserve to be aged even if only for 12 months. The extra maturation in the bottle can improve the quality of a wine greatly. It’s also a satisfying feeling to enjoy a bottle of wine with friends or family that you’ve kept for the purpose of allowing the wine to get better. It tends to make you savor that wine and pay attention to it more so than if you “popped the cork” (no offense to wines under screwcap) when you first brought it home. Do you need ideal wine cellar conditions (55 degrees and humidity controlled) to age wine, or can you just keep it in the closet of your bedroom? I believe that professional storage is not necessary for aging wines in the short-term, and this experiment will allow us to find out…. eventually.
Apartments in the midwest get too dry in the winter. If the wine was bottled recently the cork may hold for a while. I’ve seen older wines gone bad in 2-3 months. A pity.
Last fall I was at a tasting with Jorge Ordoñez (wine importer from Spain). He swears on proper storage and refrigerated transportation. He was very concerned about improper storage on the average restaurant. Don’t call him to taste the wine at the apartment, he he.
Mike, I’ve noticed that a lot of wines tend to go through a phase in their maturity when they close down for a little bit. How do you account for the fact that this sometimes happens when you’re aging short term like in this video? Do you just hope for the best?