Wine Drinking Mistakes to Avoid

Wine experts and professional sommeliers have various tricks and secrets under their belt that help them to have extraordinary wine-drinking experience. If you are a newbie in the wine world, you might not be aware of all of them. Wine Is Life Store experts suggest at the beginning of your wine journey to focus on drinking mistakes that can be easily avoided.
Based on the experience and advice of professionals, we have summarized the most common wine drinking mistakes people that affect the overall experience significantly.

Ignoring the temperature.

In our recent blog post, we have described different types of wines and liquors and the optimal temperatures for serving them. Wine experts say that the majority of wine drinkers tend to serve white wine too cold and red wine too warm. When the wine is too cold, the flavor becomes numb and does not reveal the true wine aroma. Serving red wine too warm might make it taste a bit like vinegar or way too sweet. Temperature does affect wine quality significantly. The easiest way to avoid this mistake is to use simple wine thermometer.

Read more about optimal wine temperature in our previous blog post.

Leaving opened bottle for too long.

Sometimes you feel like enjoying a glass of wine after work without any intention to finish the entire bottle. If it happened and you would like to store your bottle for later, the experts recommend keeping both red and white wines in the fridge. The cold temperature will prevent the wine from turning into vinegar. Apart from that, you must use a special bottle cork to prevent air and dust getting inside your wine. We suggest using vacuum bottle cork with a silicon base which sits stiffly on the bottleneck.

Some wine can be stored up to 5 days, but to be on a safe side, we suggest keeping an opened bottle for no longer than 2 days.

Ignoring the breathing stage.

Amelia Singer, professional sommelier says that the majority of wine drinkers underestimate the power of aeration. "Sometimes, like people, the wine just needs to breathe and chill out before you're actually going to get its true potential and particularly if you've got really alcoholic muscular red wine and it's very young, you know it's got lots of testosterone and you're just like chill out.", says Amelia. It would be great if you used a decanter. If you still did not purchase one, a little bit of swirling would do its job. 

 Learn more about wine decanter in our previous blog post.

Judging the bottle by the screw top

We are all used to seeing traditional wooden wine cork, which makes us think that the wine is of good quality and worth purchasing. Sarah Abbott, an official Master of Wine and International Wine Challenge (IWC) judge, recommends not to judge the bottle by its cork. Nowadays more and more wine producer switches to screw corks. It does not always imply that the wine is of bad quality. very often it depends on the cost of production, local regulations and personal preferences of the winery. Sarah says that screw top is great for aromatic wines. It eliminates the risk of wine taking over the flavor of wooden cork.

Overfilling the glass

Do not fill up more than 1/3 of the glass with wine. Small quantities of red wine decant in the glass significantly faster (if you are not using special decanter) and white wine will not be getting warm to fast. It is always better to refill the glass. After all, wine is meant to bring small pleasures, not to fight thirst.    

Storing Wine Standing Up

If you are planning to store wine for more than a moths, experts recommend getting a wine rack that would store the bottles horizontally. It is important to keep wine in a dark place away from sunlight and heat. A simple bottle rack is a great solution for average wines. Nowadays, the racks are available in different shapes and designs. If you are planning to invest extra cash and purchase some high-quality wines, you might consider looking for a special wine fridge and with adjustable temperature.

Explore Wine Is Life Store wine bottle rack collection.