How To Build A Home Wine Cellar
Building a home wine cellar is the perfect way to age your wine collection. Your cellar must be built to store wine correctly as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops the complexity that winemaker intended.
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 usually starts with collecting the first bottle and eventually finding that your collection has grown to a point that you cannot store it at home without a cellar.
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.
The first cons should be temperature and the amount of natural light. Ensure 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.
Wine cellars generall have thick walls. Two-by-six construction permits better insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at an even temperature. In an active wine cellar, major factors such as temperature and humidity are maintained by a cooling system.
Temperature swings can destroy your wine collection. Small temperature fluctuations from season to season will not damage the wine but those same fluctuations of 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.
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 or even from your local 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 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 bigger and better your cellar, the more the value of your house goes up as well.
A wine cellar generally maintains a lower temperature compared to its surrounding living spaces and therefore must be treated differently in relation to those spaces. Should your wine cellar require cooling do not install a domestic air conditioning unit. Home air conditioning removes the humidity from the air and will quickly destroy your wine collection by allowing the corks to dry out. 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.
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