How To Build A Home Wine Cellar
Building a home wine cellar is the perfect way to age your wine collection. Your wine cellar must be designed to age the wine in the right conditions as it matures, ensuring that the wine develops complexity and does not oxidize .
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 usually starts with collecting the first bottle and eventually finding that your collection has grown to a point that you cannot store it at home without a cellar.
A well-insulated home wine cellar can cost many thousands of dollars to build but so can a large refrigerated wine cabinet so often a walk-in home wine cellar is the more economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.
Before you start building your home wine cellar consider the following.
Temperature must be a first consideration plus strictly limiting the amount of natural light. Your wine room must be well insulated – extruded polystyrene provides ideal insulation. Those living in a mild climate you may be able to create a passive cellar that requires no cooling system.
A wine cellar will usually have thick walls. Two-by-six construction will allow for substantial 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 remain constant between 45 degrees and 60 degrees F, and always avoid exposure to 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.
Vibration should always be avoided when storing wine; it agitates the bottle and speeds up the chemical processes 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 it home and immediately pull the cork out without allowing it to return to a rested state. 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.
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. If your wine cellar requires cooling do not attempt to cool it by using a domestic air conditioning unit. Home air conditioning removes the humidity from the air and will quickly destroy your wine collection by allowing the corks to dry out. There are several brands of wine cellar cooling units available that will 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. This is the place where you will indulge your passion for collecting fine wine and where you will display your precious acquisitions. 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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