How Should I Store My Wine?
Let's start with a quiz: Which of these two environments sound the best for wine?
A. On top of the refrigerator, standing up cheerily on display under a cool-white fluorescent fixture.
B. Upside down, in the cold, dark crawl space under the house.
Store at a cool temperature
The evolution of wine in the bottle is really a number of different changes happening at once. For typical short-term aging, storing at temperatures under 70 will be fine, but for longer term aging, somewhere around 55 degrees has been determined to be ideal. You can always go colder, but the wine's development will be that much slower. Temperatures much over 70 will slowly give a "cooked" unfresh quality to a wine, and really warm (like the trunk of your car when parked in the sun) will cause wine to expand to a volume larger than the glass it is stored in, and either the cork will push out or the wine will leak right past the cork.
Keep the cork moist
Corks need to be moist to retain a good seal and to be easily extractable. When we purchase corks, one of the tests we run is moisture content (we look for around 6%). Once the wine is bottled, the best way to maintain the cork moisture is to keep the wine in the bottle against the cork. This means storage either sideways or upside down. If a wine is stored cork up for a prolonged period, say, on a store shelf, the cork can dry out and the wine will degrade quickly upon contact with air.
Avoid prolonged exposure to light
Light, especially natural sunlight and fluorescent, can cause wine to change in the bottle, the term for which is "light struck".
Correct answer: B.