The best way to store a growing wine collection is to build a home wine cellar. Your cellar must be built to store wine correctly as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops the complexity that winemaker intended.
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.
A well-built home wine cellar can cost you many thousands of dollars but so can a large refrigerated wine cabinet so that often a custom built wine cellar at home can be the most economical and cost effective way of storing your wine collection.
Take the following things into consideration before you begin construction on your wine cellar.
Cellar temperature should be a chief consideration followed by the amount of natural light. Your wine room must be well insulated – extruded polystyrene provides ideal insulation. If you reside in a mild climate it may be possible for you to create a passive cellar that requires no 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 will quickly destroy your precious 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 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 and also from your wine retailer. Never take the wine home and plan on drinking it without allowing it to rest. In fact, all your wines should be put immediately into your cellar.
Remember that it is not just your wine collection which is valuable; the wine cellar itself will increase the value to your home. So the larger and better-constructed your cellar, the more the value of your house will increase.
A wine cellar generally maintains a lower temperature compared to its 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 drying out the corks. There are several brands of wine cellar cooling units available that will cool any size 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.
