Can I use a refrigerator as a wine cooler/cellar?
I have recently acquired some fairly pricey bottles of red and white wine. I realize now that I have no suitable place to store them. Our home averages about 80 degrees during the long hot summers. Can I store these lovely vintages in a refrigerator that is stored in the garage? The refrigerator works well, we just don’t use this fridge currently. Can I manipulate the temps somehow? Trying to avoid buying an expensive wine cellar just yet. Thanks for any help.
Tagged with: fridge • red and white wine • refrigerator • suitable place • vintages • wine cellar
Filed under: All Things Wine
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When you say "store" I hear "long term" implied (particularly with the reds), so I would say not really. Get away with temporarily, perhaps.
A refrigerator is too dry. You need some humidity to keep from drying out the corks.
Also, unless you are using the refrigerator only for wine (and thus adjusting the temperature), the standard 40 degrees F for food is too low to store wine. It can slow or inhibit maturation, and can precipitate tartrate crystals (although the latter doesn’t really hurt the wine).
Wine should be stored in a dark, quiet (free of vibration), 55 degree F, 60-70% humidity environment, with some air circulation. This enivronment should remain constant, not fluctuate.
For now ageworthy wines still are sealed with natural cork (bark off a live oak tree), and thus need to be laid on their sides at an angle sufficient to allow the wine to contact the cork (keeping the cork from drying out and allowing too much oxygen to enter the bottle and spoil the wine).
With a screwcapped bottle of wine, you don’t have to worry about the cork drying out. However, as yet, scientists still do not fully understand all the processes that take place during the maturation (aging) of an ageable wine like a red Bordeaux. Cork is porous and does allow some oxygen to penetrate over the years, and it’s not fully understood if this is necessary to the maturation of the wine (however, oxygen does bond with the tannins in red wine and precipitate out as sediment, but its the tannins that are acting as an anti-oxidant here as oxygen is generally the enemy of wine). So research is still ongoing with regard to the effects of screwcaps on ~ageworthy~ wines. As for wines that will be consumed sooner, screwcaps are preferable to corks (eliminating any possibility of "cork taint" spoilage of wine).
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If your home doesn’t have the room for even a small dedicated wine storage area meeting the above requirements (a closet under stairs isn’t recommended due to the vibrations), consider the following alternatives:
- if available in your area, rent a wine locker or simialr storage at a business that provides this
- if its for a special occasion, try to find a suitable aged wine at a restaurant (either way you will pay, whether someone else aged it for you or you invested in your own infrastructure)
- simply purchase wines not intended for aging, as there is much variety and quality available in this more readily consumable category of wine (plus it will be more economical)
For the short term, yes, you can get away with using a refrigerator. I store my white wines and my pricey icewines in a fridge I don’t use regularly so the temperature is fairly controlled. If you don’t normally open up this fridge, you should be fine. However, long term, invest in a proper wine fridge.
There is a recommended degree level for keeping wine…..if you are able to regulate your fridge (put a standing thermometer inside the fridge) I don’t see why you couldnt use the one in the garage.
I keep them in the lowest part of my closet away from any wall that may be exposed to sunlight, and only put bottles inside the refrigerator after I’ve decide to open them.
Keeping bottles in the closet also help me make sure that I will only open those bottles for the occassions that I intended them for.
The perfect temperature for a wine cellar is 55 degrees. So if you set your old fridge closer to the warm setting than the cold it should work. Put an outdoor temperature gauge in there to see if you can keep it an the right temperature.
When you serve…most people serve their whites too cold, and their reds too warm. To serve whites, put in the regular (cold) fridge the day of use, then 15 minutes before you are going to open the bottle, take it out of the fridge and put it on the counter to warm a bit. For reds, take it out of your cooler the day you will serve it and put it on your counter. 15 minutes before you open it, put it into the fridge to get slightly chilled. Remember that reds should breathe for 30 minutes before serving.
By all means. Just remember not to make the fridge too cold.
You can buy a fridge thermostat for $75 at http://www.maltose.com. With this, you can adjust a refrigerator’s temperature to whatever you want.
I had the same situation some years ago, and tried many of the solutions suggested in the first seven answers. A standard fridge is just too cold for long term wine storage. Several years ago, my g/f bought me a wine fridge. This model has only one cooling area, so I average the red and whites out to about 57-58 degrees Fahrenheit, and store the reds on the top racks and the whites on the bottom racks. Not perfect, but better than in a dark but warm closet.
I’ve seen more and more of them at places like wine stores and home stores. Haijer is the brand we have. I’ve recently seen some that have two separate temp-controlled units in one fridge, but they are more expensive. A moderate priced 30-32 bottle wine fridge can be found for a couple hundred dollars (USD). Just be sure to put it in a location where the compresser running won’t induce vibrations into the stored bottles.