Keeping secrets

Fact: how you store wine will affect how it ages. OK, so not many of you will have room for a cellar. You may even have an arrangement with your wine supplier to keep your wines for you. Or maybe you've found a convenient store cupboard to use as a makeshift cellar? If that's the case, there are a few rules you need to observe.

If the temperature in your store cupboard is liable to fluctuate, or if it's exposed to light, this will age a wine prematurely. If wine is exposed to extremely cold temperatures for several months, the wine won't develop properly. Extreme heat, too, causes all kind of damage (for example, pallets of wine left on baking Tarmac en route from the winery to the merchant), as the bottles can "weep": wine seeps out through the cork and the bottle is spoiled forever.

Cooler temperatures, a bit of quiet, and somewhere dark is what wine (or me, for that matter) really wants. How cool? Between 10¡C and 15¡C is ideal. How do you keep it that cool? "You don't need expensive gear. A simple refrigerator unit with a thermostat will keep the room cool," advises John Gilchrist, proprietor of the Crooked Billet near Milton Keynes and creator of an award-winning wine list. In fact, Gilchrist is a bit of a expert when it comes to wine cellars, having managed one of London's finest at the former 1837 restaurant in Brown's hotel.

"A bucket of water in the corner keeps the humidity high, while gravel on the floor helps keep the room cooler - about 11¡C I find is best," suggests Gilchrist, adding: "And I find a bowl of apples stops the smell of damp."

You want fancy temperature-controlled gear? Then turn to Eurocave (020 7935 4679), which has storage for everything from 40 bottles to more than 200 bottles, costing from £900 to, well, the sky's the limit, in finishes that range from wood laminate to sexy stainless steel.

You've actually got more than a one-room cellar? Then place New World whites and Champagne in the room where the cooler is located, with rooms further away used for the likes of Beaujolais and red and white Burgundy, with Bordeaux and New World reds the furthest from the cooler, says Gilchrist.

Order of play
Which brings me on to my next point: getting organised. You could organise your wine cellar by region, as Gilchrist suggests, or even by style: meaty reds, bubblies, aromatic whites, and so on.

Whichever way you go, remember to place wines that need a bit of ageing within furthest reach (in their own space, ideally), with wines that are ready to drink the most accessible.

Get a cellar book going. It should lead you straight to your chosen bottle. Include the grape variety or varieties, a tasting note, where you bought it, how much it cost, when it's likely to be ready to drink, and even vinification details. And remember: the bigger the bottle, the more time it takes to mature.

To decant or not? Opinion seems to be split. My father decants anything over 10 years old, regardless of what it tastes like. Some restaurants (usually those with pretensions) decant everything with a nice label on it. But then I've seen other restaurants (usually those without pretensions) decant a chewy, tannic number from Cahors. So what's the story?

I turned to multi-award-winning - and refreshingly unstuffy - sommelier Matt Wilkin, at London's Capital hotel, to find out. "I decant only when it's necessary," he declares. "Only when it's beneficial to the wine itself, regardless of image, wine price and closure. They've got to be complex, and the wine has to be holding back. If the wine doesn't show as much on the palate as it does on the nose, then I'll decant."

We're talking younger reds here - or wines that need to "wake up a bit", as Wilkin puts it. "And top Pinot Noir, Burgundy from the 1990s and late 1980s - I'll almost always decant those. They've got quite a grip and an underlying minerality and they take quite a while to open up," he says.

But what of old claret - in traditional decanting heartland? "Actually, I'm very cautious about old clarets. I would never decant an old wine for the sake of it. You can blow off the fruit within 45 minutes of decanting, leaving you with something that tastes and smells antique. I tend to pour them very gently straight into the glass, filtering out the sediment with a piece of muslin," says Wilkin.

Serving issue "Temperature has the single greatest effect on how a wine tastes, and this factor can be controlled by whoever is serving it," declares Master of Wine Jancis Robinson. Yup, serve a red too warm and it will taste jammy, serve a white too cold and you'll lose those flavours and aromas completely.

So what is the perfect serving temperature? For crisp, dry whites, sparkling wines, very sweet wines and ros‚s we're talking no higher than 8¡C. But for bigger Chardonnays, aromatic Alsace wines and blowsy Viogniers, a touch warmer (up to 10¡C) wouldn't hurt.

It also depends on the weather. Generally, white wines drunk on a cold winter's day are better slightly warmer than the super-cool whites you would drink in the heat of summer.

Reds, on the other hand, should be a lot cooler than your centrally heated home - at about 17¡C - so ignore that room-temperature advice they like to slap on the back label. Though some lighter, fruitier reds, such as Beaujolais or Dolcetto, can be good served slightly chilled.

How to control this in a restaurant? Well, you can always buy a machine that will do it for you. The aforementioned Eurocave has just the gear. Or try Bermar International (01473 612062) - its new Wine Sellar range provides "pinpoint temperature control" for all wines, and its freestanding units have been designed exclusively for the on-trade. With a maximum capacity of 120 bottles, there is a digitally selected temperature control for white wines from 4¡C to 14¡C, while red wine temperatures range from 14¡C to 19¡C.

Getting closure There's only one real battle going on in the alternative wine closure world right now: cork versus screwcap. As more and more wine companies turn their production over to bottling under screwcap, now is the time to convince your customers - and yourselves - that it's a viable alternative to cork. With unofficial figures declaring that corked wines affect one in 10 bottles, the screwcap's time has come, folks.