How to store wine without a cellar
Keep it somewhere cool, dark and steady, as close to 13°C (55°F) as the house allows: usually an inside cupboard, away from the kitchen and the afternoon sun. How much the spot matters depends on where you live, and Barello puts a number on it. Pick your city and where the bottle sits.
Looking for the number for your fridge? See wine fridge temperature, or the wine temperature chart for serving.
Choose a city and a spot, and this line will tell you how much faster the bottle is ageing than it would in a cellar.
This is the same model that dates every bottle in Barello. Open the app to run it against your own wine.
What each spot does to a bottle, city by city
How many times faster a bottle ages than in a cellar at 13°C (55°F), in a house without air conditioning. A wine fridge is 1×, the pace every published drinking window assumes.
| City | In a cupboard | On a shelf | Garage or shed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Melbourne | 1.4× | 1.8× | Too hot |
| Adelaide | 1.4× | 1.8× | Too hot |
| Sydney | 1.7× | 2.2× | Too hot |
| Brisbane | 1.7× | 2.2× | Too hot |
| Perth | 1.7× | 2.2× | Too hot |
| Alice Springs | Too hot | Too hot | Too hot |
| Darwin | Too hot | Too hot | Too hot |
Why a warm house matters
If you have wondered whether your house is too warm for wine, it probably is, and by more than you would guess. Wine ages through slow chemical reactions, and like most reactions they speed up as it gets warmer: roughly doubling with every 10°C. Drinking windows, the years a wine is at its best, are written for a cellar at about 13°C (55°F). Keep the bottle warmer and its window opens early and closes early. At 25°C (77°F) or more the wine stops ageing and starts to spoil.
The average is not the whole story. A spot that swings between day and night is harder on wine than a steady one, which is why a garage fails even in a mild climate: it takes the sun by day and loses it at night.
The questions people ask
Is it OK to store wine at room temperature?
It depends how warm the room runs. On a shelf in Melbourne a bottle sits at about 21.5°C (71°F) and ages 1.8 times as fast as in a cellar, so ten years of cellar ageing arrives in about 5.5 years. In Brisbane the same shelf runs about 24.5°C (76°F), 2.2 times as fast. In Darwin it is about 28.5°C (83°F), where wine stops ageing and starts to spoil. Outside the hottest climates a shelf suits bottles you will open within the year, and is a poor place to keep anything longer.
Can wine get too warm?
Yes. At 25°C (77°F) or more, heat stops ageing wine and starts spoiling it, and no drinking window means anything after that. A garage is the usual culprit: even in Melbourne one runs at about 26°C (79°F) once the swing between day and night is counted. Barello flags a bottle kept somewhere that hot rather than giving it dates that look fine.
Do I need a wine fridge?
It depends on your city more than your wine. In London a cupboard ages wine only 1.1 times as fast as a cellar, close enough for most bottles. In Sydney the same cupboard is 1.7 times as fast. In Alice Springs and Darwin, without air conditioning, every cupboard, shelf and garage reaches 25°C (77°F) or more, so a wine fridge is the only good place to keep wine. Air conditioning helps: Barello asks whether you run it, and takes about 3°C off the rooms it cools.
Can I keep wine in the kitchen fridge?
Short term, yes. A kitchen fridge runs at about 4°C (39°F), colder than the 13°C (55°F) a cellar keeps, and it dries the air, which is hard on corks. Barello holds a bottle kept there at cellar pace rather than counting the cold as a bonus, and treats the fridge as a place for wine you will open soon, not a place to keep it.
Should wine bottles lie on their side?
Only if they have a cork. Lying down keeps the cork damp, so it does not shrink and let air in. Most Australian wine is sealed with a screwcap, which does not care which way up it is kept, so those bottles can stand. The Clare Valley's producers led that move in 2000.
How long can I keep a bottle?
That depends on the wine far more than the room: most wine is made to be drunk within a year or two, and only some is built to age. The drinking-window explainer covers how to tell. What the room decides is how fast the bottle gets there.