Building a home wine cellar is the perfect way to age your wine collection. 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 starts when you collect your first bottle of wine and soon you’ll discover that your collection has grown so large that it requires its own wine cellar.
A well-built home wine cellar can cost you many thousands of dollars but so can a large refrigerated wine cabinet so that often a custom built wine cellar at home can be the most economical and cost effective way of storing your wine collection.
Before you start building your home wine cellar consider the following.
Temperature must be a first consideration plus strictly 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 create a passive cellar that requires no cooling system.
A wine cellar is usually built with thick walls. Two-by-six construction permits better insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at an even temperature. In an active (as opposed to passive) wine cellar, the temperature and humidity are maintained by a climate control 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 be maintained between 45 and 60 degrees F, and avoid 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.
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.
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 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 wine should be immediately placed in your cellar.
Remember that it is not just your wine collection which is valuable; the wine cellar itself will increase the 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 your wine cellar requires cooling do not attempt to cool it by using a domestic air conditioning unit. Domestic air conditioning removes the humidity from the air and will quickly destroy your wine collection by drying out the corks. 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. 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 you have the space, you could try incorporating a bar or a wine tasting area.