You have ordered your bottles from Chant des Caves but you have doubts about how you could store them? First of all, if you haven't already read it, don't hesitate to take a look at our article on the best conditions for storing your wines . Today, we are tackling the question of choosing the wine cellar, and how to choose it according to your own needs?
Rather service cellar or aging cellar?
The first question to ask yourself in your search is: what type of wine cellar do you need? There are two types of cellars: service cellars and aging cellars.
All wines can be stored and aged at a temperature between 10°C and 14°C. The notion between conservation and aging? Conservation is short-term storage, i.e. less than 5 years, while aging is longer-term storage, i.e. 10, 15 or even 20 years and sometimes more.
The aging cellar, as its name suggests, will be more suited to keeping your wines over several years and will thus allow you to preserve and age your wines, almost as if they were underground.
A service cellar, for its part, will be ideal for bringing your wines to the right temperature before opening them . This type of cellar is very popular with professionals, particularly restaurateurs, who need a good quantity of “ready to serve” wines, but is nevertheless becoming more and more common among individuals. A service cellar can offer you several temperature levels, so that you are always ready to serve red wine, as well as white wine!
If, however, you need both aspects of the wine cellar, don't panic! There are also multi-use cellars , which allow you to have different humidity percentages and temperatures depending on the different compartments. These multi-use cellars are, however, as you can imagine, quite expensive.
What are the must-haves?
Regarding aging cellars, there are a few essential things to check before purchasing your cellar and to monitor for the proper conservation and aging of your wines.
As said a little earlier, the temperature must first of all be constant: between 10 and 14°C , ideally constantly at 12°C to avoid temperature variations. An also very important element in order to maintain the elasticity and therefore the tightness of the caps is the humidity, or the degree of hygrometry , which must be between 50% and 85%.
Choose an anti-UV treated glass door or a solid door to protect your bottles from light: darkness is one of the best friends of good wine storage.
Where do you want to put it?
This may seem obvious, but also think about the location of your wine cellar before purchasing. These are often quite large objects , often deep due to their thermal regulation system. Also, be careful of the noise from the cellar itself, some are noisier than others.
For how many bottles?
However, the capacities given by manufacturers are most often indicated by taking as reference the sizes of Bordeaux bottles , which are generally smaller than others. Larger bottles of Burgundy, or even Champagne, will take up more space and distort this capacity a little.
You now have all the cards in hand to choose the wine cellar best suited to your needs!