Wine Cellars – How To Build Your Own
Building your own wine cellar is the best way to age your wine collection. A cellar should be designed to correctly store wine as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops complexity and depth and does not spoil.
Building your own wine cellar from the ground up – or more likely, the basement up – may seem like an overwhelming task, but the proverbial first step is usually the most difficult. It all begins with collecting the first bottle and eventually finding that your collection has grown so large that you can no longer store it.
A well-insulated wine cellar can cost many thousands of dollars to construct but so can a large refrigerated wine cabinet so often the custom built home wine cellar is the more economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.
Consider the following before you start building your wine cellar.
Temperature should be a chief consideration and also 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.
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 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 temperature fluctuations on a daily or even 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 a humidity level between 50% and 80% is ideal for all types of wine.
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 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 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 is generally a lower temperature environment compared with its surrounding living spaces and therefore must be treated differently in relation to those spaces. If the temperature in your wine cellar suggests that it 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 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. 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 home wine cellar and, if you have the space, why not consider incorporating a bar and tasting area.
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