Patrick Cournot, the owner and sommelier behind Ruffian, a teensy wine bar in New York City's East Village neighborhood, knows this firsthand. Ruffian’s narrow digs has room only for a dozen or so seats along its landing strip of a bar. Cournot lives across the river in Brooklyn, land of pint-sized apartments, and is well-versed in creative stockpiling solutions. If anyone can fit wine storage in small spaces, it’s him.
Curious about how to make wine collecting work in cramped quarters? Here are some of Cournot’s spot-on tips.
Plenty of well-meaning oenophiles stash bottles in their kitchens, but it’s one of the worst possible places to store wine. “That’s the room that will get the hottest of all the rooms in your apartment,” says Cournot. Heat essentially cooks the wine and can turn it bitter in a relatively short period of time.
2. Lay bottles flat when possible.
The wine bottle cork can shrink if it gets too cold or too dry. When this happens, oxygen can get inside the bottle and dull the wine’s flavour, eventually turning it bitter. One way to combat shrinkage? Lay your bottles flat. “Liquid is touching cork, so it’s not going to dry out,” explains Cournot.
3. Rethink the refrigerator.
4. Don’t let the light in.
"Light is the worst enemy of wine,” says Cournot. Even if a cork is plugged in tight, ultraviolet rays found in sunlight can prematurely age and taint a vintage. The lighter the wine and the more transparent the bottle, the more susceptible the wine is. The solution? Store wine in a dark place, and if that’s not a possibility, “it’s not that hard to throw a towel over it."
5. The hall closet is your friend.
“If you have anything that’s being stored for months at a time, you’re not going to remember what you have,” says Cournot, adding that he has seen plenty of bottles “wind up in Never Never Land.”
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