Making and bottling your own wine is a dream to many people – myself included.  It’s fun, surprisingly inexpensive, and doesn’t require very much time or general effort.  In fact, getting started in making wine doesn’t even require purchasing books or learning a vast amount of information.  A quick look at a few blogs, printing off some general information, and ordering your own wine making kit is pretty much all your going to need to make your own wine.

But what about storing wine after you’ve bottled it?

This is a question that I get asked with a surprisingly high degree of frequency, which is why I’ve begun going into more in depth detail on the mechanics of it.  It’s as simple as everything else, you just need to know what it is that you are doing.

• Basements work great.  I keep my wine bottles stored in my basement, against a wall that doesn’t have any light.  This is essential to keeping the wine in its best possible shape, since any light that gets on to the bottles for a long period of time will inevitably have negative repercussions.  Light exposure is one of the worst things you can do to a bottle of wine.
• Temperature control is critical to the quality and longevity of your wine bottles.  You don’t want it in a basement that gets really cold in the winter, and gets really hot in the summer.  In fact, you want to keep the general temperature as consistent as humanly possible.  I worry less about this than light – so remember that.  Keeping your wine in a dark place is more important than making sure the temperature never changes.  But any temperature fluctuations will have a detrimental affect on the finished product.
• Are your bottles airtight?  Are you a hundred percent positive?  Bottling and corking your wine is a fun and pretty easy part of the process, but making sure that you aren’t overfilling the wine bottles is important if you want them to age well.  And if you are corking at home, making sure that you are using a good corker is important.  These can be rented from a lot of wineries and wine equipment shops, so if you don’t want to shell out several hundred dollars on a good one its pretty easy to get one for your uses anyway.  I highly recommend this over buying a cheap one that may do a ‘decent’ job.  That ‘decent’ job very well may impact the longevity of bottles of wine that you have put time and effort into.  There’s nothing worse than fermenting a hundred bottles of red wine and finding out that eighty of them went bad before you could enjoy them or give them to friends just because you skimped on the wine bottle corker.  Go rent one.  You’ll thank me later.

On my blog www.winestainedfeet.com I talk about the importance of wine storage a lot, I even detail wine storing compartments and other higher tech gadgets that you can invest in when you have the money.  They aren’t necessary right out the gate, but are worthwhile investments when your home wine making hobby has moved up to the next level.