How To Build Your Own Wine Cellar

February 4, 2010 · Filed Under Food and Drink

Building a home wine cellar is the ideal way to store your wine collection in top condition. Your cellar must be built to store wine correctly as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops the complexity that winemaker intended.

Building a home wine cellar from scratch may seem like a daunting process, but the first step that proverbially applies to climbing mountains applies to wine cellars, too. 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.

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

Take the following things into consideration before you begin construction on your wine cellar.

Cellar temperature should be a chief consideration followed by 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.

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, 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 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. 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.

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.

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 and also from your wine retailer. Never take it home and pull the cork out without allowing it to rest. In fact, all wine should be put immediately into 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.

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. 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 quickly destroy your wine collection by allowing 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 is a personal statement, and will become one of the most important areas 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.

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