Storing Port Wine?!
Storing Port Wine?
Everyone tells me that good Port wine will not survive extreme temperatures.
I opened a bottle of 20 year old Tawney which had spent 2 years osculating between 21 and 31 degrees Celsius (though in the dark) and it was divine.
Is this possible? Why?
Answers:
Actually, two years of a ten degree fluctuation would do little harm to port. Being a fortified wine, port is usually quite resilient. If you had left it for a few more years like that, however, the wine would likely have shown deterioration compared to an identical bottle kept under proper conditions.
Non-fortified table wines are much more sensitive to these temperature fluctuations. Again, in the short term the changes are not as noticeable. Where mistreatment of the wine really shows is when tasting well aged wines. When attending tastings of fully mature Bordeaux or Burgundy, there tends to be a great deal of variation from bottle to bottle of the same wine, depending on where that wine was sourced from and how it was stored throughout its cellar life.
Anyway, I'm glad your tawny was enjoyable!
Cheers!
you are very lucky the dark was what kept it from going bad but in my experince port is best kept in stable temp,s
The brandy content keeps it stable.
This being the reason it ( port ) was created in the first place.