Building A Home Wine Cellar

Building a home wine cellar is the ideal way to store your wine collection. A cellar should be designed to correctly store wine as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops depth and complexity and does not spoil.

Building a home wine cellar from scratch may sound like a daunting process, but the first step that proverbially applies to climbing mountains applies also to wine cellars. It usually starts with collecting the first bottle and eventually finding that your collection has grown to a point that it requires a cellar.

A well-insulated wine cellar can cost many thousands of dollars to construct but so can a large refrigerated wine cabinet so often the custom built home wine cellar is the more economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.

There are several items to consider before your begin 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 (as opposed to passive) wine cellar, the temperature and humidity are maintained by a climate control system.

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 quickly 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 always be between 45 and 60 degrees F, and avoid 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.

When storing wine all vibration should be avoided; it agitates the bottles and speeds up the chemical reactions taking place inside the bottle – and not in a desirable way.

Vibration is a major issue during the transportation 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 immediately pull the cork out without allowing it to return to a rested state. In fact, all wine 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. 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 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. 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.