Building a wine cellar at home is the perfect way to store a wine collection. A wine cellar must be designed to store wine in the right conditions as it ages, ensuring that the wine does not spoil and that it develops complexity.
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-constructed wine cellar can cost many thousands of dollars but so can a large refrigerated wine cabinet so often a custom built wine cellar at home can be the most economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.
There are several things to consider before you start building a wine cellar.
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 reside in a mild climate it may be possible for you to create a passive cellar that requires no cooling system.
A wine cellar will usually have thicker walls. Two-by-six construction provides space for quality insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at a constant temperature. In an active (as opposed to passive) wine cellar, the temperature and humidity are maintained by a climate control system.
Temperature swings will quickly destroy your precious 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 stay between 45 and 60 degrees F, and exposure to direct sunlight should be avoided. 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.
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.
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 the wine home and plan on drinking it 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 better-constructed and larger your cellar, the more the value of your house goes up as well.
A wine cellar generally has a lower temperature environment compared with the surrounding living areas and therefore must be treated differently in relation to those areas. 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 allowing the corks to dry out. 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 space for you to indulge your passion for wine collecting and where you will display your latest 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.
