Cellaring Your Wine
Spearheaded by Penfolds flagship Grange is a formidable stable of red and white wines that will reward careful cellaring. In order for your Penfolds wines to deliver their true potential, it is important to follow a few simple wine storage measures. This information will help with the correct storage of your wine.
Wine Storage: Why cellar your wine?
Simply, most high quality wines will improve with age. As a wine matures over the passage of time it will slowly evolve, developing greater complexity and bottle-aged characters. Complex reactions occur during the maturation process, creating new aromas and flavours as the structure of the wine gradually changes.
Ideally, buy a few bottles of each wine you intend to cellar and periodically assess the development of the wine. By doing so, you will discover what the ideal ‘drinking window’ is for each of your wines, in accordance with your own palate.
Do all wines benefit from cellaring?
All Penfolds wines will reward careful cellaring. However, the optimum bottle maturation period will depend upon whether the wine is red or white, its ‘style’, the format (size) of the bottle and the vintage. Some wines are deliberately made for earlier consumption, whereas others are crafted for the long haul.
As a rule of thumb, red wines generally enjoy longer and more predictable cellaring than white wines. However, the evolution of the screw-cap closure has had a positive impact on maintaining freshness and quality, especially with white wines. Indeed, some styles of white wine can evolve with ease for a decade or more.
Poorly stored wines may not retain their original freshness and will most likely develop faster and less predictably than bottles that have enjoyed a constant, steady maturation process in a temperature-controlled cellar or wine cabinet. Wine is especially vulnerable to fluctuations in temperature. It is always best to transport wine in cool conditions and to store wine in an environment that minimises temperature variation.
