You're storing your wine wrong

A wine buff says keeping red wine in the fridge will help to preserve the flavour. Photo / Getty

You may have heard that chilling red wine is a no-no, but according to a vino expert, storing a bottle of red in the fridge is the ideal way to keep it fresh.

Editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine, Jancis Robinson, said keeping a bottle at a low temperature will help to preserve the flavour.

"Put any open bottle in the fridge. Even red wine," she told the audience at the UK wine event, Hay Festival.

"Low temperatures slow down chemical reactions including oxidation, which is the enemy of an open bottle."

And if you tend to keep the white wine in the fridge until just before pouring a glass, you may want to rethink that one too, says the wine buff.

Oaky white wines should be served at the same temperature as a light red, says the wine expert. Photo / Getty

According to Robinson, chilling a white wine for too long is a vino faux pas, as certain varieties are not created to be kept in very cold conditions.

"It is nice to have champagne very cold, or a light-bodied Riesling," she told the Daily Mail.

"But once you get a full-bodied, oaked white, like a mature white burgundy, you really want it at the same temperature as a light-bodied red."

Robinson's down-to-earth approach to wine tasting even extended to plastic corks, a topic that often turns wine pros irate.

She said she was coming round to the plastic stoppers, and that a new generation of plastic corks had become pleasingly "squidgier" than their earlier counterparts.

Robinson also predicted Patagonia in South America, and Scandinavia were likely to become key wine producers in future.

-nzherald.co.nz