wine storage

Welcome to our new series Kitchen Hacks, where we take ordinary household objects and transform them into useful kitchen tools. We know it's difficult to stock a kitchen with every gizmo and gadget, especially if you live in tight quarters. So instead of junking up your drawers with unused items, try make-shifting kitchen tools with our tips.

It's always a messy and upsetting event when a wine bottle cracks and its precious contents leak during transit. The diligent packer may cover it in styrofoam or bubble wrap, but many of us are guilty of haphazardly wrapping the bottles in old kitchen towels and crossing our fingers they arrive to the next destination in one piece.

Here's a new way to easily and securely wrap up wine if you don't have a wine sleeve handy. We recently received a bottle of Las Rocas Garnacha, outfitted in the most unexpected makeshift wine sleeve: a kitchen mitt! A fluffy cotton kitchen mitt fits a wine bottle snugly — plus it also seconds as a cute gift if you're bringing the bottle over to a friend's place. Just be sure to find a long glove, so the neck of the bottle stays protected, too.

Know of any other smart ways to transport wine? Share them with us below.

When we sat down with Ray Isle at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, he not only talked value wines, he also shared tips for storing wine. Ideally, wine should be kept in a temperature-controlled room or refrigerator, but an interior closet with a steady temperature of 65-68°F is perfectly fine. Unfortunately, according to Isle, many people don't know how to properly store wine and make the common mistake of keeping it in the wrong place. If you've got bottles that you want to enjoy at a later date, read on to learn where not to store your wine.

I recently made a stop by the Roshambo Winery tasting room in Sonoma and noticed a peculiar thing. Keeping with the winery's offbeat aesthetic, a gang of vintage school lockers had been used as vino storage to create a retro, industrial feel. As it turns out, the lockers are the ideal depth to house a stack of wine bottles. Better yet, each shelf and locker allows for compartmentalization, so you can keep your sauv blanc separate from your cabernet. And if you'd like to keep the good stuff safe from the kids, you can always use a lock and key. Try salvage shops and 1st Dibs for vintage lockers. Or stop by your local school and see if they've got any to spare.