Storing Wine
Few of us are lucky enough to live in a home with a purpose built basement; the term cellar has to be a broad one. For some it's a rack under the stairs or in a small bedroom or corner in the garage, some will opt for a Eurocave (a commercially made temperature and humidity controlled cabinet), others use a converted fridge.

Ideal temperature conditions for storage are 11°C, in fact anything between 5 - 18° C will do perfectly well, providing there is no great temperature variation over a short period of time. Higher temperatures increase the rate of oxidisation in a wine, therefore a bottle stored at 18°C, will gradually get older than the same wine stored at 11°C. However a constant 18°C is far kinder to a wine than erratic temperatures that often hit 11°C, but jump 3°C up one day and 3°C below the next.

Sunlight and artificial lighting will also effect the wine, these effects are still being studied, but it is sensible to consider darkness of almost equal importance to the storage of wine as temperature.

Bottles should be stored horizontally to keeps the corks moist and airtight. Storing a bottle upright will in time result in a shrunken, dried out cork causing oxidisation.
Wine feeds on the small amount of air trapped inside the bottle between the wine and cork, and on the oxygen naturally absorbed by the wine through the cork. So avoid storing your wine in strong odour rooms i.e. Kitchens.
It is during this slow oxidisation period that various elements and compounds are formed and changed in a complex chemical process known as maturation resulting in an ever changing evolving wine.