October 18, 2016 11:19 am
Published by admin
Look for a wine club that offers cave tours If you’re trying to decide which wine club to join, pick one that offers a cave tour. Caves are the perfect places to store and age barrels of wine. Well out of the sun, they maintain an even temperature year round, which is nice and low but not freezing. As air from the outside enters the cave and cools, its relative humidity increases. This reduces the loss of wine through evaporation that would otherwise happen when storing a non-airtight barrel for years at a time. The humidity of a wine cave... View Article
August 4, 2016 3:24 pm
Published by admin
Tour the caves where wine is stored One of the best things about wine clubs is being invited on a cave tour. Caves, which stay at just the right temperature and humidity year-round, have been recognized for centuries as some of the best places to store wine in the barrel. So perfectly suited are these caves that when immigrants to California found there weren’t enough caves in the Napa hills, they hired mining and railroad engineers to build caves for them. The humidity in a wine cave should be at least 75 percent — more than that if there are... View Article
July 6, 2016 12:02 pm
Published by admin
Cave tours in Napa Valley Caves. They are dark and mysterious. They are chilly, but never too cold. Despite not having been built for comfort, they were some of humanity’s first shelters, and the location of some of our first attempts at art. For centuries, they’ve been used to store wine barrels — the air in them is always at just the right temperature, so there is very little evaporation of the wine despite the hairline gaps that let air into the wine barrel and make it possible to tap the barrel. So it was that when winemaking came to... View Article
June 2, 2016 10:28 am
Published by admin
Wine caves of Napa Valley Caves have been used to store wine barrels for a very long time. The wine caves of Napa Valley, many of them built at the same time and by the same methods and workers as the first railroads to reach California, are famous. The air in them, humid and always cool but never freezing, is perfect for storing wine barrels for years or decades, as it minimizes the loss of wine to evaporation through the hairline gaps in the wine barrel. The vineyards that own these caves have turned them into places worthy of exploration... View Article
May 3, 2016 11:54 am
Published by admin
Caves are great for storing wine One of the great pleasures of exploring the wine culture of Napa Valley is the cave tour. Caves, with their even year-round low but not freezing temperatures, have been recognized for centuries as excellent places in which to store and age wine in the barrel. Humidity, which would normally be the last thing you’d want in any kind of long-term storage environment, is ideal for the storing of wine. Because the barrel is not perfectly airtight (if it were, you’d have to fight a vacuum every time you opened the tap) a little wine... View Article
