How To Build A Home Wine Cellar
Sunday, February 7th, 2010 Subscribe To Our Feed
The best way to store a growing wine collection is to build a home wine cellar. Your cellar should be designed to correctly store wine as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops complexity and depth and does not spoil.
Building a home wine cellar from the ground up – or more likely, from the basement up – may seem like an overwhelming task, but that proverbial first step is usually the most difficult. It starts when you collect your first bottle of wine and soon you’ll discover that your collection has grown so large that it requires its own wine cellar.
The cost of a well-constructed wine cellar can run to many thousands of dollars but so can a large capacity refrigerated wine cabinet, so you may find that building your own wine cellar can be the most economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.
Before you start building your home wine cellar consider the following.
The first cons should be temperature and the amount of natural light. Make sure the room is well insulated – extruded polystyrene insulation is ideal. If you live in a mild climate you may be able to create a passive cellar that doesn’t require any cooling system.
A wine cellar is generally constructed with thick walls. Two-by-six construction allows for better insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at a constant temperature. In an active wine cellar, major factors such as temperature and humidity are maintained by a cooling system.
Temperature swings of more than a few degrees a day can destroy your wine collection. Small temperature fluctuations from season to season will not damage the wine but those same fluctuations of a daily or weekly basis will cause your wine to age prematurely. Temperature should be maintained between 45 and 60 degrees F, and avoid direct sunlight. It is possible to build a wine closet or a wine cupboard at home that will have the required humidity level of between 50% and 80% that is ideal for all types of wines.
Your must avoid vibration when storing wine; it agitates the bottle and speeds up the chemical reactions taking place inside the bottle – and not in a good way.
The transportation of wine can become a major vibration issue and is the reason most shippers recommend allowing your wine to rest after extended travel. This is important, too, when you buy wine at a cellar door or even from your local wine retailer. Never take the wine home and plan on drinking it without allowing it to rest. In fact, all wine should be immediately placed in your cellar.
It should be noted that it is not only your wine which is valuable; the wine cellar itself will add value to your home. So the better-constructed and larger your cellar, the more the value of your house goes up as well.
Unless you live in a very cold climate a wine cellar usually provides a lower temperature environment compared with to the surrounding living spaces and therefore must be treated differently in relation to those spaces. Do not attempt to cool a wine cellar by installing a domestic air conditioning unit if your wine cellar requires cooling. Home air conditioning removes the humidity from the air and will quickly destroy your wine collection by allowing the corks to dry out. Several popular brands of wine cellar cooling units are available that will cool any sized wine cellar. Your wine cellar makes a personal statement about you, and will become the most important area in your home. This is the place where you can indulge your passion for fine wine and where you can display your precious acquisitions to friends and family. Click here to discover how to build a home wine cellar and, if you have the space, you could try incorporating a bar or a wine tasting area.
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