Building A Home Wine Cellar
Building a wine cellar is the ideal way to store your wine collection. A cellar should be designed to correctly store wine as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops depth and complexity and does not spoil.
Building your own home wine cellar from the ground up may seems like an overwhelming task, but the proverbial first step is usually the most difficult. It starts when you collect your first bottle of wine and soon you’ll find that your collection has grown so large that it requires its own 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 a custom-built home wine cellar can be the most economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.
There are several things to consider before your start building a wine cellar.
Wine cellars generall have thicker 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 should be a chief consideration and also the amount of natural light. Your wine room must be well insulated – extruded polystyrene is ideal insulation. If you live in a mild climate you may be able to create a passive cellar that doesn’t require any cooling system.
Temperature swings of more than a few degrees a day can destroy your wine collection. Small temperature fluctuations from summer to winter will not damage the wine but those same fluctuations on a daily or weekly basis will cause your wine to age prematurely. Temperature should always be between 45 and 60 degrees F, and avoid direct sunlight. Thus, you can often successfully create a wine cellar in a closet and humidity between 50% and 80% are ideal for all types of wine.
When storing wine all vibration should be avoided; it agitates the bottles and speeds up the chemical reactions taking place inside the bottle – and not in a desirable way.
Vibration is a major issue during the transportation and is the reason winemakers recommend allowing your wine to rest after travel. This is important, also, when you buy wine from a winery or even from your local wine outlet. Never take it home and pull the cork out without allowing it to rest. In fact, all wine should be put immediately into your cellar.
Note that it is not just your wine which is valuable; the cellar itself will improve the value of your home. So the larger and better-constructed your cellar, the more the value of your house will increase.
A wine cellar is generally a lower temperature environment compared with its surrounding living spaces and therefore must be treated differently in relation to those spaces. If your wine cellar requires cooling do not attempt to cool it by using a domestic air conditioning unit. Domestic air conditioning removes the humidity from the air and will quickly destroy your wine collection by drying out the corks. There are many brands of wine cellar cooling units available to cool any size wine cellar. Your wine cellar will become one of the most important areas in your home and will make a personal statement about you. It is the place where you will indulge your passion for collecting fine wine and where you will display your precious acquisitions. Discover how to build your own wine cellar and, if you have the space, why not consider incorporating a bar and tasting area.
