Where To Build A Home Wine Cellar

The best way to store your valuable wine collection so it ages properly is to build a home wine cellar. Your cellar should be designed to correctly store wine as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops complexity and depth and does not spoil.

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. 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.

Take the following things into consideration before you begin construction on your wine cellar.

Temperature must be a first consideration plus strictly limiting the amount of natural light. Ensure 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 is generally constructed with 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, 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 temperature fluctuations on a daily or even 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.

When storing wine all vibration should be avoided; it agitates the bottles and speeds up the chemical reactions taking place inside the bottle – and not in a desirable way.

Vibration can become a major issue during 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 pull the cork out without allowing it to rest. In fact, all your wines 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 bigger and better your cellar, the more the value of your house goes up as well.

A wine cellar generally requires a lower temperature than the surrounding living areas and therefore must be treated differently in relation to those areas. 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 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 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 can indulge your passion for fine wine and where you can display your precious acquisitions to friends and family. 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.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.