The best ways to store wine at home 

How to store wine at home is an important matter for the budding sommelier. Here’s our advice on how to store wine and some ideas to inspire the design of your new kitchen.

Initial considerations

If good quality wine is to retain or even improve its characteristics, it must be stored in particular conditions. Before brainstorming design ideas on how to store your wine, consider factors that will contribute to its continued quality. 

Tips:

Keep temperature constant

Wine doesn’t appreciate steep differences in temperature. Going from relatively hot to cold can cause your wine to age badly, due to altering chemical reactions in its natural compounds. 

Due to their primary function, kitchens are liable to varying temperatures, so it’s important that wine is stored away from heat-emitting appliances. Ideally it should be kept at around 12 degrees celsius.

Avoid strong light

If strong enough, light can alter the colour of wine – it makes white wines darker, and red wines lighter. Hence wine is ideally  stored in relative darkness, away from powerful lights or large windows. 

Lie bottles on their side

Putting bottles on their side helps to maintain the wines quality by preventing air from entering through the cork. 

Design Ideas

Whether you’re a wine expert or you just enjoy a glass every now and then, it’s important to keep your bottles in the right conditions. But these storage requirements needn’t be a barrier to how you want to design your kitchen. 

Indeed, your wine collection can even become the centerpiece around which you craft the space. Incorporating cabinet or rack into your kitchen can ensure that your wine ages well. 

Wine cabinet

Offering a storage space to suit all types of wine, cabinets can be easily integrated into your kitchen design. You could include one as part of a kitchen island, or stow it underneath a worktop. Alternatively, for greater impact, you could have the unit built into one of the kitchen walls. 

Wine fridges and coolers

Wine coolers offer an efficient way to store different types of wine. The varying heights of the shelves in most cabinets are cooled at slightly different temperatures, meaning that champagne, white wine, and red wine can all be stored together (champagne at the bottom, red at the top).

 The benefit of proper fridges is that your wine will be ready to drink right away, no chilling required for your whites and your reds won’t get too warm with your heating. 

Wine rack

Wine racks don’t need to be hidden away in a corner – they can form an integral part of your kitchen design. They can be used to turn a wall into a feature, providing space to store your bottles whilst enhancing the visual qualities of the room. 

If you’re working with a large space, wine racks may be used to divide it into distinct areas with different moods and purposes. For a more discreet solution, they can also be adapted to fit in smaller, unused spaces – you could tuck bottles away between units or under staircases. Regardless of where you’d like to put them, wine racks can be made from most materials (as long as they are strong enough) to compliment the style of your kitchen.    

At Burnhill Kitchens, we consult with clients on all aspects of kitchen design, including wine storage. Our award-winning designers create bespoke spaces and solutions – whether you’re looking to integrate a wine cooler into a kitchen island, or a wine rack into a custom-made pantry, a Burnhill Kitchen will meet all of your requirements. For more information and inspiration, request a free brochure.