A Home Wine Cellar - How To Build Your Own

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A Home Wine Cellar - How To Build Your Own

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

Building a wine cellar is the perfect way to store your valuable wine collection. A cellar should be designed to correctly store wine as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops complexity and does not spoil.

Building a home wine cellar from scratch may sound like a daunting process, but the first step that proverbially applies to climbing mountains applies also to wine cellars. It all begins with collecting the first bottle and eventually finding that your collection has grown so large that it requires a cellar.

A well-constructed wine cellar can cost many thousands of dollars but so can a large refrigerated wine cabinet so often a custom built home wine cellar can be the most economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.

Consider the following before your start building a wine cellar.

A wine cellar will usually have thicker walls. Two-by-six construction will allow for substantial insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at a constant temperature. In an active wine cellar, important factors such as temperature and humidity are maintained by a climate control system.

Temperature must be a major consideration and also limiting 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 build a passive wine cellar that requires no cooling system.

Temperature fluctuation of more than a few degrees 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 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 humidity between 50% and 80% are ideal for all types of wine.

Vibration should be avoided 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 also important whenever you buy wine from a winery or even from your local wine outlet. Never take it home and immediately pull the cork out without allowing it to return to a rested state. In fact, all wine should be immediately placed in 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 is generally a lower temperature environment compared with 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 fast destroy your wine by drying out the corks. There are many brands of wine cellar cooling units available to cool any size wine cellar. Your wine cellar is a personal statement, and will become one of the most important areas in your home. It is the place where you can indulge your passion for fine wine and where you can display your precious acquisitions to friends and family. Discover how to build your own wine cellar and, if you have the space, why not consider incorporating a bar and tasting area.