Where To Build A Home Wine Cellar
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 home wine cellar from scratch may seem like a daunting process, but the first step that proverbially applies to climbing mountains applies to wine cellars, too. 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-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.
Before you start building your home wine cellar consider the following.
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 build a passive wine cellar that requires no cooling system.
A wine cellar is usually built with thick walls. Two-by-six construction provides space for quality 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 summer to winter will not damage the wine but those same fluctuations on a daily or 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. 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.
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 most shippers recommend allowing your wine to rest after extended travel. This is important, too, whenever you buy wine at a winery cellar door 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 your wines 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 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 usually provides a lower temperature environment compared with to the 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. Several popular brands of wine cellar cooling units are available that will cool any sized wine cellar. Your wine cellar is a personal statement, and will become one of the most important areas in your home. 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 your space is large enough you may be able to incorporate a wine tasting area or a bar.
