Discover How To Build A Home Wine Cellar
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 as the winemaker intended.
Building your own home wine cellar from the ground up may seems like an overwhelming task, but the proverbial first step is usually the most difficult. It starts when you collect your first bottle of wine and soon you’ll find that your collection has grown so large that it requires its own cellar.
The cost of a well-constructed wine cellar can run to many thousands of dollars but so can a large capacity refrigerated wine cabinet, so you may find that a custom-built home wine cellar can be the most economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.
There are several things to consider before your start building a wine cellar.
A wine cellar is usually built with 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.
Cellar temperature should be a chief consideration and also the amount of natural light. Your wine room must be well insulated – extruded polystyrene is ideal insulation. Those living in a mild climate you may be able to create a passive cellar that requires no cooling system.
Temperature swings 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 remain constant between 45 degrees F and 60 degrees F, and always avoid exposure to direct sunlight. 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.
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 it home and pull the cork out without allowing it to rest. In fact, all wine 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.
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 your wine cellar 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 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 makes a personal statement about you, and will become the most important area 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.
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