I can put that in a spot with no sunlight. Will my wine degrade (aside from the degradation that occurs from the temperature/humidity).
Does it matter which wine bottles I chose to bottle my wine with?
asked Mar 27, 2014 at 18:30
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2 Answers
I believe that the short answer is yes, artificial light can cause sun damage too.
Ultra-violet light is cited as the primary spectrum/wavelength/frequency that has the biggest impact, and while direct sunlight is going to have much more of it and therefore be more detrimental over time, light bulbs generally emit a certain amount of UV too. From what I've read, fluorescent lights or CFL's produce more UV than other types of bulbs.
Too much of any type of light or heat can potentially have unwanted effects, however, particularly if there are living yeasts in the product.
For example: if the drinks were being stored in clear glass, in a warehouse with a lot of fluorescent lights to which the bottles were being exposed directly, I would fully expect the taste to be noticeably different within an amount of time that's not too extremely long to matter in practical contexts.
Conversely: if the drinks were being stored in very dark brown glass bottles in a room with recessed can-fixture lighting that was using incandescent bulbs (perhaps spotlights as opposed to floodlights) so that the bottles weren't directly exposed to the source, and if the walls and floors were darkly colored and also didn't reflect a lot of UV light, well... You can see how the exposure to light and heat from a room's lighting can conceivably be minimized to the point that they won't be hurting the wine, or "not in our lifetime" as they say.
UV light reflects or bounces off surfaces and things more than visible or infra-red waves do, and although darker colors are a safer bet for absorbing more of it than lighter colors, it's not always easy to judge that just by how it looks in the normal visible spectrum.
If you were to use bottles that were completely opaque, or if you wrapped your bottles in something that's completely opaque and impermeable to usual amplitudes of light etc., well then maybe you wouldn't have to worry about that very much at all.
You should use dark bottles and store them in a fairly dark place or at least no direct light on it (sun or artificial). The source of the light won't matter, it's the intensity you got to watch out for.