You don’t want your wine expanding and contracting daily. So, ideal cellar conditions are a temperature of up to 15˚C, a relative humidity of 75 per cent, and that these conditions suffer as little variation as possible. A digital thermometer in your cellar tracking daily and seasonal highs and lows is essential, even if it is the bearer of bad news. The reason that temperature changes are so damaging stems from the expansion of the wine as the temperature rises, and contraction as it falls.
The most critical temperature changes are those recorded daily, although these will be coupled with seasonal changes. In turn, variations in cellar temperatures are the oft-hidden source of all evil for wines sealed by corks. This is where storage/cellar conditions become critical. While the mouldy smell and taste this taint imparts can make the wine undrinkable, Portuguese cork makers have belatedly changed the way wine corks are made, and reportedly reduced the incidence of cork taint to below three per cent – from a much higher level in the 1990s.īut the most important failure of cork is oxidation that is, where the cork simply hasn’t done its job of keeping the air out. Cork taint – usually by a substance in the cork called trichloranisole, or TCA for short – is the less important reason. There are several reasons for this mass migration from corks to screwcaps by Australia's winemakers.
Clearly, in terms of wine storage advice in Australia, it is a whole new landscape. Even this tells only part of the story: 96.8 per cent of white table wines were screwcapped and less than one per cent used cork. Of the 6827 wines detailed in my 2012 Wine Companion, 85 per cent used screwcaps, while tellingly, only eight per cent used one-piece natural corks (the remainder using various other closures).
The elephant in the wine cellar is the screwcap. James Halliday guides us through the ins and outs. Wine storage and cellaring the essentials of wine storage remain the same, though the sweeping impact of the screwcap must now be considered.
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