World renowned. Washington grown.

Bringing Out the Best in Columbia Crest Wines

When you’ve finally chosen your favorite bottle of Columbia Crest wine and brought it home, the next step is to determine whether you can pop the cork now or need to wait. While it isn’t absolutely necessary to age wine, this process allows flavors to blend and fully develop before reaching their peak. Some wine lovers prefer a few years of bottle age on all the wine they drink, red or white. Others believe that the more full-bodied, robust red Bordeaux wines are worth the wait.

How to Age Columbia Crest White Wines

If you already like our white wines, including Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Semillon, Semillon-Chardonnay, or Chardonnay, then you don’t need to age them. When you buy the wine, just keep it in a cool, dark place until you plan to chill it and drink it. Our Grand Estates Chardonnay or Reserve Chardonnay, on the other hand, can be aged a year or more to bring out their full potential. Just cellar them the way you would any red wine.

How to Age Columbia Crest Red Wines

If you taste a Columbia Crest red wine that appeals to you, the same basic rule applies: you don’t have to age it. But remember that well-made red wines can take on greater complexity as their flavors integrate and their tannins soften.

Our Cabernet Sauvignon, Columbia Valley Merlot, Columbia Valley Merlot-Cabernet, Grand Estates Cabernet Sauvignon, Grand Estates Merlot, Reserve Red and Reserve Syrah will all reward patient wine drinkers who can wait a few years to see how the wine develops. Under the right cellaring conditions, Merlot, Cabernet and Syrah can age for a decade or more.

Creating a wine cellar

Unless you are a serious collector, you don’t need a teak-paneled, refrigerator-controlled wine cellar with special racks for different types of bottles. In fact, you can use any enclosed space for aging wine, as long as it is cool, dark and still. All your wine wants is to be left alone, with minimal changes in conditions, so it can continue the work that began in the winery.

Temperature is critical, because heat “cooks” wine, drying out the flavors and aging the wine with unnatural speed. Ideally, the temperature should be fairly constant between 50 and 60 degrees. (If you can arrange for 60 to 70 degrees relative humidity, so much the better.) If you think that your wine might be drying out, put a bowl of water near the wine and watch to see how fast it evaporates. Another way to check if your wine is drying out is to look at the “ullage”—the space in the neck of the bottle between the wine and the cork. If that air space is growing, the wine is evaporating through the cork. The solution may simply be to seal and insulate the space you’re using, or buy a small home humidifier.

Light is another enemy of wine, because it can alter the slow, steady biochemistry of bottle aging. Finally, you want a still, quiet space such as a closet, a crawlspace, or part of a basement, because moving air dries out wine and vibrations unsettle the integration process of aging.

No matter which wines you choose to age, and how you go about it, remember that the goal is to increase your wine-drinking pleasure.

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