Great Fine Wine

Building a home wine cellar is the perfect way to age your wine collection. Your wine cellar must be designed to age the wine in the right conditions as it matures, ensuring that the wine develops complexity and does not oxidize .

Building a home wine cellar from the ground up – or more likely, from the basement up – may seem like an overwhelming task, but that proverbial first step is usually the most difficult. 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 your home wine cellar consider the following.

The first cons should be temperature and the amount of natural light. Your wine room must be well insulated – extruded polystyrene provides ideal insulation. If you live in a mild climate you may be able to create a passive cellar that doesn’t require any cooling system.

A wine cellar will usually have 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, 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 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 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.

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 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, also, when you buy wine from a winery 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 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 generally requires a lower temperature than the surrounding living areas and therefore must be treated differently in relation to those areas. Do not attempt to cool a wine cellar by installing a domestic air conditioning unit if your wine cellar requires cooling. Home air conditioning will remove the humidity from the air and will quickly destroy your wines by causing the corks to dry out. Several popular brands of wine cellar cooling units are available that will cool any sized wine cellar. Your wine cellar makes a personal statement about you, and will become the most important area in your home. This is a space for you to indulge your passion for wine collecting and where you will display your latest acquisitions to family and fellow wine-loving friends. 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.

Further Reading:

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