Discover How To Build A Home Wine Cellar
Building a wine cellar is the perfect way to store your valuable wine collection. A cellar should be designed to correctly store wine as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops 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 all begins with collecting the first bottle and eventually finding that your collection has grown so large 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 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 must be a major consideration and also limiting the amount of natural light. Make sure the room is well insulated – extruded polystyrene insulation is ideal. If you live 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 stay between 45 and 60 degrees F, and exposure to direct sunlight should be avoided. 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.
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 also important whenever you buy wine from a winery or even from your local wine outlet. Never take it home and pull the cork out without allowing it to rest. In fact, all your wines should be put immediately into your cellar.
It should be noted that it is not only your wine which is valuable; the wine cellar itself will add 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 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 will remove the humidity from the air and will quickly destroy your wines by causing the corks to dry out. There are several brands of wine cellar cooling units available that will 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 space for you to indulge your passion for wine collecting and where you will display your latest acquisitions. Discover how to build your own wine cellar and, if you have the space, why not consider incorporating a bar and tasting area.
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