Pinot Squirrel is a wine storage site. Not tasting notes, not scores, not a buying guide: the practical question of how to keep wine from going wrong, whether that is a bottle you opened last night or a case you want to still be good in ten years.
There are over 150 guides here, and they cover four things: storing and ageing wine, the wine facts people actually search for, wine fridges and coolers, and the mistakes that quietly ruin bottles.
How this site is researched
Wine storage advice is repeated far more often than it is checked, which is why so much of it contradicts itself. The guides here reference scientific papers alongside authoritative industry sources, and where the evidence is thin or disputed we say so rather than pick the tidier answer.
For the producer and visiting guides the standard is stricter again. Every price comes from the producer’s own website and carries the date we checked it, and where a house does not publish its prices we say that instead of estimating. Nothing here claims a visit we did not make.
Where to start
If you have one bottle and one question, these cover most of them:
- How should wine be stored, the short version of everything else here.
- Wine storage temperature chart, twelve wines with a figure for each.
- Does wine go bad, for a bottle you are suspicious of.
- Wine corks, including getting one back into a bottle.
- What to store in a wine fridge, which is not only wine.
Beyond storage
Two sections go further than the cupboard. Wine regions covers places you can actually visit, starting with Port tasting in Porto and the Douro, with every cellar visit compared by price. Grapes and wine styles explains what is in the bottle, beginning with the Port styles.
Questions, corrections and challenges to anything written here are welcome through the contact page. Corrections especially: if something on this site is wrong, we would rather hear it than keep publishing it.