Cellaring Port --- ideal temps/storage conditions

[csquared78]

Hello Portheads,

I'm new to this forum, and to port as well, but have enjoyed my first few months drinking port and learning.

A few questions:

What temperature is ideal for cellaring port?

What is the proper way to cellar port? In racks like wine, or is there a different method?

Thanks

[jdaw1]

On their side, ideally in original wooden cases, but racked is fine. At 14° C or thereabouts, 55°F.

The next step is harder. Don’t touch. Leave them bottles alone. For a few decades.

[uncle tom]

Julian is right - but don't get too hung about the fine detail - biggest thing to avoid is significant day/night temperature changes - gentle variation between summer and winter is not an issue

Check out my note in the tasting notes section about the Warre '77 I'm currently drinking - excellent wine, despite showing signs of having lived upright for most of it's life - probably in someone's kitchen cupboard..

Not touching the bottles IS a problem though - some people on this site send their bottles to distant storage locations to reduce the temptation.

My own solution is to have so many bottles, some of them have to wait!

- Welcome on board!

Tom

[Conky]

Welcome aboard,

and its worth mentioning that even against all convential wisdom, a bottle shoved upright in a kitchen cupboard for 20yrs+, can come out as glorious! Not something to aim for, but dont dismiss the possibility it either.

Alan

[g-man]

I like to have my bottles up right a few days before I pop them ...
just to let the sediment settlement .... older ports like older wines have alot of chunks.

[DRT]

This is a good topic for our Information About Portindex.

Any volunteers to write a short piece about how to store vintage port?

Derek

[Axel P]

Welcome,

I think that storing is a totally exaggerated topic that many people earn good money with. It s easy for me to say as I do have the perfect cellar for storing, but there are some things to pay attention to:

light: wines should be kept in the dark - not an issue for ports as the glass is almost non-transparent anyways.

vibrations: yes, I think this is a topic especially if you want to store your wines through decades. If you are moving your wines from time to time, this will be no problem, but storing them on an old fridge where the motor starts every hour might influence the evolution.

temperature: I agree with jdaw, uncle tom and concy: fast changes in temp are not good for the wine, i.e. it will evolve earlier. Optimum is a constant temp of 12C. Slow changes from summer to winter and back are not a player.

humidity: From my point of view this is a fairly important point. If its too dry you get cork-leakers and the cork will soak up the wine an might break. If its too humid the labels and the wooden cases might get bad. Around 70% is fine, but as with temperature a slow in- or decrease shouldnt affect the wines too much.

Due to the fact that port has a higher percentage of alcohol, the influence of a bad storage shoudnt be the same as with table wines. I had a 63 Noval VP that was stored for 25 years on a cupboard in the living room directely under a hughe light bulb. Well the 63 Noval wasnt my favorite in Vintage Ports, but this wine was not more or less developed than other well stored examples I had.

All said, I do have an experiment running since 2002. I placed a lot of bottles of Chateau Poujeaux 1999 at different places outside the cellar in my house. I will start to drink them from 2012 on to see if a 10y temperature, humidity, vibration and light change will have an effect on the evolution on this wine as I do have a perfect wooden box in the cellar.

So more in 4 years

Axel

[jdaw1]

Please report back on that experiment. I am most interested in the outcome.

[mosesbotbol]

I've only been storing wines for about 12 years, but I have not had a problem even with delicate wines being stored in my cellar.

I pile the cases on top of each other and then cover all the cases with a blanket. It is difficult for me to maintain any kind of humidity as the winters are bone dry and we use a dehumdifier in the summer.

That being said, the cellar does go through season swings, and the summer's max temp may be in the 60's, but in the end all is good.

I should check for leakers, but I fret having to break open OWC's just for that purpose.

[Alex Bridgeman]

I should check for leakers, but I fret having to break open OWC's just for that purpose.

I know it sounds a bit stupid, but try sniffing a case. I find that port when it seeps from a bottle and then dries out has a very intense smell and you can tell when you have a leakage problem just by the odour of a case.

Works for me, anyway.

Alex

[jdaw1]

This is a draft of the article requested by Derek. Comments, rewrites, etc; all welcomed.

This advice on cellaring port is based on several people’s comments in an earlier thread entitled Cellaring Port --- ideal temps/storage conditions, with contributions from a discussion of leaking bottles of Vesuvio.

• Don’t get too stressed about fine detail. Port is a fortified wine and things don’t have to be absolutely perfect for it to age well over many decades.
• The ideal temperature is about 12°C≈54°F to 14°C≈57°F. The day-to-night variation should be as little as possible, and the summer-to-winter variation shouldn’t be excessive. Fast temperature changes are thought to be bad; slow changes of only a few degrees are thought to be harmless.
• Bottles should be lying down such that the cork is kept wet, either in racks or in original wooden cases. If holding port for resale then OWC is probably better.
• Vibration is not good over the long term, as it can accelerate seepage through a senile cork, as well as mixing sediment with the liquid: don’t hold ports for many years in a fridge. (Though some wine fridges separate the motor from the cabinet containing the juice: such fridges should not be a problem.)
• The ideal humidity is about 70%. The air should be sufficiently wet that the corks will not dry out; but extreme damp rots cases and labels more quickly.
• Some port houses have foolishly put recent vintages in slightly larger bottles with a long neck. These bottles contain more air (a larger gap between cork and top of fill). So, for any given change in temperature, the corks will be subject to more pressure than old-style high fills, increasing the risk of leakage and of cork failure. Where there is a risk of temperature variation perhaps these bottles should be stored at an angle so that the liquid makes contact with approximately a third to half the cork. This inconvenient practice would then allow any expansion to force air past the cork, leaving the port in the bottle—preventing apparent leakage. This theory has not been properly tested.
• If bottles are stored in OWC one can detect a leaking bottle by sniffing the case. When port seeps from a bottle and then dries out it has a very intense smell.

[csquared78]

I've read so much about cork failure/leakage in port bottles ... more so than I've ever read about other wines ... Is leakage common?

[jdaw1]

Maybe “seepage† would be a better term than “leakage†. But not uncommon.

Dry reds are typically drunk within a decade. Even good ones within two. Port hangs around in the cellar for 40+ years (there’s still plenty of 1963 available). So seepage happens more.

[uncle tom]

In the first instance, vintage port normally enjoys the finest of corks, but as Julian correctly notes, those corks are put to the test of time like no other wine.

Old cellars and dealers tend to weed out leaking and seeping bottles, and send them to auction - this raises their profile in the market place.

From my own experiance, I find that occasional cases yield a leaky bottle when opened, but in my cellar, it is extremely rare for bottles that have proved themselves to be sound for a generation to then show signs of seepage.

My cellar holds over 800 sound bottles that are over 25 years old. Out of those, the number that emerge as seepers is in the order of only one or two a year.

Tom

[Alex Bridgeman]

I've read so much about cork failure/leakage in port bottles ... more so than I've ever read about other wines ... Is leakage common?

I think that in the port world, leakers are probably given more discussion time per bottle than in the table wine world. We are always looking for an excuse to open a good bottle and the fact that the cork is allowing a little port to seep past it it one such excuse.

I have around 250 bottles at home that I recently re-racked. Of those 250, only 2 came out as showing signs of seepage and that was probably brought about by the trauma of having moved house in the last year. My experience over a 10 year period is that I do not see sound corks spontaneously failing and, if I purchase bottles that show a sign of seepage but still have good fills, this can often be solved simply by dipping the cork and neck of the bottle into a pot of sealing wax (but I don't recommend this as a solution if you are investing in port as opposed to buying port for your own consumption).

Vibration is not good over the long term, as it can wobble the cork loose: don’t hold ports for many years in a wine fridge.

Nice draft, but a couple of comments specifically on the above paragraph. I wasn't aware of the danger of vibration working a cork loose, so that is a new fact that I have filed away. I had always understood that the danger of vibration was the constant agitation of the wine causing the sediment in the wine to be in constant motion and also eding up the interaction of the wine with the bubble of air trapped inside the bottle when the cork was inserted.

I'll also speak up in favour of proper wine storage cabinets. I've been using one at home for over a decade and it keeps the bottles vibration free. A properly built and designed wine storage cabinet keeps the compressor motor separated from the rest of the cabinet and therefore does not subject the wine inside to vibration. The danger to the wine can come from long term storage in a fridge, as opposed to a specially built wine fridge. A domestic refrigerator does not separate the frame for the compressor motor from the frame of the fridge and therefore does generate semi-constant vibration of the contents. I suggest that you modify the draft wording to read "...don’t hold ports for many years in an old domestic fridge"


Alex

[uncle tom]

Thinking about the relative physical properties of cork and glass, and the circumstances of their contact in the neck of a bottle, I'm doubtful that modest vibration would cause a moist cork to 'wobble loose'.

However, it seems quite possible that the micro shocks of noise or vibration might act as an accelerant to seepage through a senile cork.

Tom

[jdaw1]

AHB, Uncle Tom: fixed, thank you.

[DRT]

Jdaw,

Could you please copy your post on storage conditions into a separate thread and then insert a link to it in the Information About Port thread?

Thanks

Derek

[jdaw1]

Done, and done.

[jdaw1]

All said, I do have an experiment running since 2002. I placed a lot of bottles of Chateau Poujeaux 1999 at different places outside the cellar in my house. I will start to drink them from 2012 on to see if a 10y temperature, humidity, vibration and light change will have an effect on the evolution on this wine as I do have a perfect wooden box in the cellar.

So more in 4 years

What happened?