Wine Knowledge | Insights from the Team at Stainton Wines, Kendal

We Like to Share Our Wine Knowledge

We fully appreciate that the world of wine can be a daunting place for anyone embarking on their journey or discovery and enjoyment. Here at Stainton Wines, we want to help everyone discover more about these wonderful drinks and the stories behind them, as well as helping to ‘de-bunk’ a few myths and misconceptions that people may have about wine.

Our intention is to add further articles to this section of our website in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

If there’s any wine-related subject that you’d like us to cover, please Contact Us with your suggestion and we’ll be happy to oblige.

Advice for Starting Your Cellar

Starting a wine cellar of your own can fall into three catagories:

Buying for investment, that is to keep the wines for period of time and hopefully your speculation will pay off as the wine can increase in value, in some cases exponentially.
Buying a range of fine wines with the express intention of maturing them yourself to enjoy at a later date.
Or simply putting together a balanced selection of wines to have at your disposal for you to enjoy or entertain.

When developing a cellar for your own drinking it is best to think short, medium and long term.

How Much Should I Pay For A Decent Quality Wine?

It’s a question we’re asked all too frequently and for good reason, especially given the current economic situation in the country and the impending cost of living crisis: how much should I pay to get a decent bottle of wine?

We’re no fools and are fully aware that you can find bottles of wine – bearing in mind these will have been industrially produced in eye watering numbers – for around five pounds in any supermarket here in the UK. But let’s start by breaking down the costs involved in putting a bottle of wine on the shelf in the UK and see if we can work out the approximate real value of the liquid in the bottle.

Cork or Screwcap: Which Is Best?

It’s a debate that we still hear frequently for both right and wrong reasons, and it’s a point of discussion that is set to rumble-on for a good few years yet: what is better for wine, cork or screwcap?

And when we say, “better for wine”, this itself needs a little unpicking as both have their benefits and given today’s more modern methods of wine production and bottling, there is very little to distinguish between screwcap and cork when it comes to the most important factor of all: flavour.

FIND OUT MORE

Laying Down Wine

Firstly, let me begin by saying that this is not a piece on investing in wine to make a profit, far from it. Yes, we are all fully aware there is a huge amount of that sort of thing that goes on and we have ourselves been known to dabble in the dark arts of wine futures every now and again.

No, this is about re-kindling a tradition whereby wine, of a certain calibre, was purchased soon after fermentation and often not yet in bottle, usually still resting in oak barrels, in a process named “en primeur”.