Building A Wine Cellar At Home

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. 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.

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 building your own wine cellar can be the most economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.

Before you start building a wine cellar there are several things to consider.

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 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 usually built with thick walls. Two-by-six construction permits better insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at an even temperature. In an active wine cellar, important factors such as temperature and humidity are maintained by a climate control system.

Temperature swings of more than a few degrees a day can 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 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.

Your must avoid vibration 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, 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 usually provides a lower temperature environment compared with to the surrounding living spaces and therefore must be treated differently in relation to those spaces. Do not attempt to cool a wine cellar by installing a domestic air conditioning unit if your wine cellar requires cooling. 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 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.