Fun and Wine

The best way to store a growing wine collection is to build a home wine cellar. 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. It starts when you collect your first bottle of wine and soon you’ll discover that your collection has grown so large that it requires its own wine 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.

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 live in a mild climate you may be able to create a passive cellar that requires no cooling system.

A wine cellar will usually have thick walls. Two-by-six construction allows for better insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at a constant 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.

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 is a major issue during the transportation and is the reason winemakers recommend allowing your wine to rest after 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 pull the cork out without allowing it to rest. In fact, all your wines 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 larger and better-constructed your cellar, the more the value of your house will increase.

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 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. 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.