Building your own wine cellar is the best way to age your wine collection. A wine cellar must be designed to store wine in the right conditions as it ages, ensuring that the wine does not spoil and that it develops complexity.
Building your own wine cellar from the ground up – or more likely, the basement up – may seem 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 wine 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 wine cellar at home can be the most economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.
There are several items to consider before you begin building your wine cellar.
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.
A wine cellar will usually have thicker walls. Two-by-six construction provides space for quality insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at a constant temperature. In an active wine cellar, major factors such as temperature and humidity are maintained by a cooling system.
Temperature swings of more than a few degrees a day 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. Thus, you can often successfully create a wine cellar in a closet and a humidity level between 50% and 80% is ideal for all types of wine.
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 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, 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.
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.
Unless you live in a very cold climate 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 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 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 home wine cellar and, if you have the space, why not consider incorporating a bar and tasting area.
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