Wine Wedding Gift

March 15, 2009
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wine wedding gift
How long does an unopened corked red wine stay fresh?

I have a bottle of Portuguese red table wine which was a wedding gift. The dark bottle is at least 5 years old and has been sitting on a shelf in my kitchen. I’m unsure if it may have required a different storage atmosphere (cooler conditions, darker area) Is it still ok to drink?

Is your wine a Port? If it is, all of the rest of this answer is for naught. Port wines (sweet dessert wines from the Douro Valley in northern Portugal) are virtually indestructible before being opened. If it is a Port wine, it should say so on the bottle, and you might also notice the words “ruby” or “tawny” or “LBV” on the front of the label. Since you referred to it as a table wine in your question, I will assume it is NOT a Port wine, and so we can move on from here….

The answer to this question can be given in a short form and in a long form; first, the long form:

A bottle of wine should be stored on it’s side in a cool, dark, controlled climate environment. The reason wine goes “off” is because of a very basic chemical reaction called oxidation. When you open a bottle of wine, the reason it is no good the next day is because you expose that wine to air, which contains oxygen, which causes the wine to oxidize. Even if it is not yet opened, there is a bit of oxygen inside the bottle already (that space between the cork and the wine, bottles are not filled all the way to the top, right?) and oxidation is occurring.
Oxidation is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, under controlled conditions, it is part of the aging and maturation process that can make a good wine great. Perhaps the most famous for aging, Bordeaux wines (wines made from a blend of primarily Cabernet Sauvingon and Merlot grapes, produced in the Bordeaux region of France) are sometimes aged for over 20 years. HOWEVER, oxidation can very easily be the enemy of wine if:
1) The wine is not meant for aging. Many FANTASTIC wines are meant to be enjoyed young, that is, drunk fairly soon after it is produced. This does not mean it is a poor quality wine, it just means that the winemaker wanted you to enjoy it sooner rather than later
2) The wine is not kept in a controlled environment. Heat and light both speed up the process of oxidation, so both are bad for the longevity of the wine. When a bottle of wine is stored on it’s side rather than standing up, the cork is kept moist. When the wine bottle is stored standing up, the cork dries up, shrivels, and quite often lets in more air. This also drastically speeds up the oxidative process and is bad.

That is the long answer. Here is the short answer:

As heat (and changes in temperature) are particularly bad for wine longevity, the kitchen (it is the room in which the temperature is most affected by ovens and stoves and what have you) is a particularly bad place to store wine. If you don’t own a wine cellar, do what my wife and I do, we put our “wines to store” in a back closet of the coolest room in our house. We also don’t buy really expensive wines, because we know we are not truly storing them properly.

If the bottle of wine has been standing out in your kitchen for five years, I wouldn’t drink it… it is probably closer to vinegar than wine, and would probably not be very enjoyable. But don’t despair. You can always hold on to the unopened bottle as a keepsake. It is not the wine in it that holds value, it is the fact that it was given as a gift and is a wonderful reminder of your beautiful wedding day.

Laser Engraved Wedding GIFT CARD Box

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