Five Tips for Cellaring a Cabernet Sauvignon to Perfection

Are you having a tough time cellaring your expensive Cabernet Sauvignon? Not for long, as we deftly present the best approaches to let your wine be perfect at all times. All the wine connoisseurs agree that when you sip your wine, all the fine notes of the flavor should sing. For those flavors to stay intact, you definitely need to fine-tune your knowledge of cellaring. This post shows good ways for cellaring a Cabernet Sauvignon to perfection.

The wine has to evolve through various stages to increase its aromatic texture, giving  its feel on your palate as you sip it. Allowing the taster to savor every note. Wines bring on more flavor and depth as they age; only proper cellaring can provide the time for the wine to develop and grow in intensity. Often, wine sommeliers understand the personality of the wine and its complexity, which is achieved through proper storage.

Different wines age differently, and Cabernet Sauvignon is no different. Well! Now that was a tricky line, but the true age of a wine defines its texture, quality and most importantly, the depth of complex taste it has carried through that period. This also boils down to the cellaring that you create for the finest wines made from the labor of love.

Five Tips for Cellaring a Cabernet Sauvignon to Perfection

1. The perfect environment

Building a cellar to its specifications is hard as you need to keep in mind several aspects. One of the crucial steps involves ensuring the place isn’t too damp or too dry but cool and doesn’t get direct sunlight. The light, heat, and movements can take a toll on how your wine will end up tasting. Hence the designated place needs to be allocated for cellaring your wine collection where temperatures aren’t likely to fluctuate ever so often. Wines like Cabernet Sauvignon shouldn’t be stored in the kitchen, laundry or boiler room, as the changing temperatures and vibrations in these places can impact the wine aging process.

Key factors do play a role in making a suitable environment for wine storage a place where the wine can rest undisturbed with an evenly set cool temperature. The usual spaces are under the bed, on the floor or in a temperature-controlled basement. The above two places are great if you don’t have much stock, but with a large stock, the temperature-controlled basement would be the right spot to keep your precious wine.

You need to understand, like all wines. Cabernet Sauvignon needs to have that perfect humid temperature setting between 450 to 650. So, if you are considering getting a wine cooler with controls to maintain the temperature and humidity. So you could begin with ideal storage conditions for cellaring your Cabernet Sauvignon collection.

2. Placing bottles on the sides

To retain the longevity of your fine wines, lay them on their sides so that the liquid keeps the cork moist at all times. The humidity of the storage room, which has to be 50 to 80%, will prevent the corks from going dry. 

The room has to be dark or use a light protective casing to prevent the light penetration from ruining the wine. The wine bottles are also of darker color. This is a measure taken to prevent wine from being formed too quickly. The rushed process releases sulfur compounds that make the wine taste really bad!

3. Bottle size is crucial

Large bottles are often better for storing, which plays a role in the evolution of flavors as the aging process begins. The aging of the wine also gets better when Cabernet Sauvignon is placed in a larger glass bottle; hence, they come in magnum, double, and imperial bottle ranges. Both light and heat impact the wine and are minimized this way. 

The minimal movement and prevention of vibrations will enable it to age gradually. The upsetting of the sediment can accelerate the aging of the wine and ruin the flavor.

4. Aging in the wine cellar

Before you stock up on wine and begin cellaring, you need to understand the various aging potentials of wines you add to your collection. Different wines are aged for various periods of time depending on their style and quality. 

The peak drinkability period will change for different wines. Some may be consumed sooner, within the first five years of aging, while others take more than seven years or may be enjoyed even after two decades. Cabernet Sauvignon wines are often aged for years in cellars, giving them the added flavor influences and lasting aroma.

5. Picking the right wine

Now that you’ve got the cellaring part right, you must know which wines are worth cellaring. Cabernet Sauvignon is the right wine collection to be cellared since the red wines already have naturally occurring tannins and the oak barrel provides those astringent compounds that develop over time. 

The aging process will reduce those compounds, breaking them into various aromas and desired flavors that soften and emerge to turn them into fine wine. The acidity in the wine is a natural preservative that is found in the grape. Every variety has varying citric levels at the time of harvest, and diligent plucking of the right grape for Cabernet Sauvignon is essential to maintain the balance of taste and flavor.

Takeaway

When you think of cellaring a Cabernet Sauvignon to perfection, you must know that these are some of the longest-lived wines, and you need to work on getting the best conditions for this kind of wine.  

You would have gotten an idea of how important cellaring can help maintain this consistency. Getting humidity and temperature levels right is the key to retaining the complex and high-quality of the Cabernet flavor, allowing them to evolve deeper into further complex aromas. That’s when you could sit down, pour a fine glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, and enjoy every sip!

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