Build Your Own Home Wine Cellar
August 17th, 2009 at 11:06pm Under General
Building a home wine cellar is the perfect way to age your wine collection. Your cellar must be built to store wine correctly as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops the complexity that winemaker intended.
Building a wine cellar at home from scratch may sound like a daunting process, but the first step that proverbially applies to climbing mountains applies also to wine cellars. Of course, it all starts with collecting the first bottle and eventually finding that your collection has grown so large that you can no longer store it.
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.
Before you start building a wine cellar there are several things to consider.
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 will usually have thick walls. Two-by-six construction permits better insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at an even temperature. In an active wine cellar, important factors such as temperature and humidity are maintained by a climate control system.
Temperature swings can quickly 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 always be 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.
Vibration is a major issue during the transportation 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 it home and pull the cork out without allowing it to rest. In fact, all wine should be put immediately into 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 bigger and better 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. Should your wine cellar require cooling do not install 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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