Bottling and Aging Wine - How to Make Homemade Wine

Bottling and Aging Wine - How to Make Wine From Home

 A basic rule to observe in how to make homemade wine is that you need relatively cool conditions in which to store and age your wine. This allows you to store your wine for the long term without it going bad on you. Experts in how to make homemade wine will tell you that the preferred optimal temperature for storing the majority of homemade wine would be 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

You need a relatively cool environment for storing your wine because it can reduce the effects oxidation will have on the final product. That is why you need cool temperatures to store your final product, and why experts in how to make wine from home will recommend that you store your bottled wine out of direct sunlight. You may have noticed that even commercial vintners will store bottled wine in dark cellars or basements – this lessens the incidence of surplus oxygen production in the bottled wine that could alter the taste.

Do follow this rule but don’t get too obsessed about marginal changes in the cool environmental temperatures. A change of a few degrees higher or lower the temperature scale will have minute effects on your bottled wine that probably aren’t discernible anyway. But when learning how to make wine from home, prepare a storage area in advance so that you don’t panic scrambling around for a cool place to store your wine.

Avoid Wild Temperature Fluctuations

Knowing this rule, it should be obvious to you that wild temperature fluctuations can really be harmful to your bottled wine. This means that a room with a 65 degrees Fahrenheit stable temperature is always preferable to a room whose temperatures is indeed cooler than 65 degrees but will fluctuate wildly – say from 65 down to 50 then back up again to 65.

Wild temperature fluctuations like this are a challenge for newbies because it may be difficult to find a storage area at home whose cooler temperatures can be controlled to a stable range. Nevertheless, it is very important when undertaking how to make homemade wine that will be good to the taste, to prepare such a storage area well in advance.

Rapid changes in temperature will harm the wine and change the flavor significantly. The aroma wears down, your wine will taste bland, and maybe your bottled wine will lose that character you were seeking for that bottled wine variant. Though your bottled wine may be able to tolerate one night of temperature fluctuations, when the temperature flux occurs over a prolonged period, the stored bottled wine will eventually wear down under this kind of stress.

The Reasons Wild Temperature Changes Harm Your Wine

Anyone well-versed in winemaking knows that two things will be affected when temperatures rise and fall constantly: the wine within the bottle, and the bottle itself.

When temperature goes up, your wine will expand and so will the wine bottle. You may not notice this because the glass wine bottle will not balloon out of shape, yet physics tells us both will indeed react this way to higher temperatures. When temperatures fall, your wine and the wine bottle will then contract. But the wine does not expand and contract at the same rate as your wine bottle though they are subjected to the same temperature in the room. The wine liquid tends to expand and contract more than the glass bottle it is in.

When the liquid expands, some of it will inevitably escape out of the cork cover which is not fully air-tight. As temperatures in the room cool again to lower levels, the liquid will contract – and this sucks in some air through the cork into the wine bottle, which is bad. This exchange of gases (the aroma of the wine escaping through the cork and then air being sucked into the bottle to replace the lost aroma) means that slowly but surely your bottled wine’s valuable bouquet will be changed and eliminated if the temperature flux goes on long enough.

A few incidents of temperature change may occur in your storage room but the minor effects will not be so discernible and could be negligible. But if the temperature flux is persistent, then your bottled wine will become bad wine.

Check for Temperature Changes before Attempting to Learn How to Make Wine From Home

The time for determining whether a storage room undergoes significant temperature changes should be done way in advance, even before you try learning how to make wine from home. This is because if your first choice of storage area turns out to have erratic temperature levels, you may need some time to find another better storage area for your bottled wine, and then test temperature levels again.

Remember that to test for temperature changes, you have to monitor the room over a continuous period of time and not just do a one-time check. Many places that you might have thought automatically qualifies as a suitable wine storage area is actually constantly subjected to erratic temperatures all the time and to a significant degree (like changing by five degrees Fahrenheit within minutes or in an hour.)

If you don’t have a suitable place at home for storing your precious homemade wine, it may be wiser to hold off learning making wine until a very good storage place can be found and made usable. Otherwise, your wine may just be wasted because it will eventually leach out its bouquet due to the unsuitable temperatures in the room. For help in constructing a wine cellar CLICK HERE.

By preparing a good storage area well in advance, the odds that you will produce very good and presentable wine go up in your favor – then you’ll eventually be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor which is a bottle of excellent homemade wine. More free information on wine clarification and racking is available at this site under our tips and tricks section, Racking & Wine Clarification.

We recommend you read our article Everything About Corks next.

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