Ideal Wine Cellar Conditions And Requirements
Whether you have a Passive or Active Wine Cellar, we recommend an average temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit for all wine storage. Cooler temperatures wont damage your wine but will slow its development. Keep in mind, a temperature of 65 degrees or more will have a negative effect on wine the longer its stored.
The ideal humidity in your wine cellar should be 60-70%, but anything over 50% is acceptable. High humidity, 80% or more, may cause mold to form on the corks and bottles.
The ideal long term wine storage should avoid heat, direct light and vibration. Ideally, your space can accommodate these conditions year round. If not, consider investing in a wine cooling unit and humidification system.
Color Code Storage Boxes
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Organize the type and style of your wines by color with storage boxes! Use the corresponding colors on wine storage boxes, drawers, or baskets to make finding your favorite vintage quick and easy.
No matter where you choose to store your wine, these creative wine room ideas will help keep your collection organized in style! Looking for other room design projects? Check out these kitchen remodeling ideas for more inspiration!
Looking for wine storage options outside of your home? Extra Space Storage offers climate-controlled wine storage at select storage facilities throughout the nation. Find wine storage near you!
How To Build Your Wine Cellar To Accommodate The Above Conditions:
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Designing A Residential Custom Wine Cellar
The aesthetics of the cellar racking is what most people think of when we talk about wine cellar designs. However, an experienced wine cellar designer will include specifications for materials, refrigeration system, doors, lighting, insulation, and much more.
They will consider loading factors, room size, traffic, whether walls will be glass, inside walls, outside walls, local climate, and provide a detailed design drawing including the specifications and costs of equipment. They will do this as well as specifying and visualizing racking type, capacity and the type of wines to be stored.
Even if you do it yourself, you are much more likely to be successful if you start with a professional residential wine cellar design. Moreover, given that good wine cellar designers will provide a design for free you would probably be crazy not to get one.
Install The Proper Lighting
UV light can spell disaster for your home wine cellar. Thats because UV light causes light strike in wine, where the vitamin B2 in the wine is photoactivated and creates hydrogen sulphide and Mercaptans. This results in sulfuric smelling wine. This is the reason why your home wine cellar needs to be void of sunlight but the sun isnt the only source of UV. Many light bulbs, including fluorescent lights, emit a significant amount of UV rays. When trying to find low-UV lighting for your cellar, steer towards incandescent, LED and sodium vapor bulbs. You might also opt to put in a motion sensor or timer to ensure your wine doesnt soak up any more UV than necessary.
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The Wine Cellar Designers Group
The Wine Cellar Designers Group is an affiliated group of manufacturers, builders, contractors, and salespeople. Their commonality is that they all work to common standards in the construction of both residential and commercial wine cellars. They work together to promote the construction standards needed to build a stable, efficient, quality wine cellar.
The best way to find a contractor, or to use your own contractor, is to consult with a wine cellar specialist. In many parts of the country, we can recommend contractors who have worked with the Wine Cellar Designers Group.
In Las Vegas, we can do the build-out for you ourselves. If you have a contractor that you have worked with before and are happy with, we are more than willing to provide guidance during your wine cellar build to assure that he is creating your room the way it must be built.
Reading this straight forward guide yourself should give you a much better insight into the elements that make a quality residential wine cellar. It should also help you avoid many of the pitfalls many unfortunate homeowners experience.
Invest In A Humidifier
Wherever you are, humidity fluctuates with weather changes. Thats why you should invest in a trusty air humidifier that can offset the dryness in the air, especially if you live in an area that is significantly dry.
To maintain ideal humidity levels in your space, a humidifier is crucial. This helps prevent your corks from drying up, which can cause your wine to prematurely oxidize.
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Start With The End In Mind
Before building your wine cellar, you should first come up with a design guided by your needs, and then plan how to build your wine cellar.
As tempting as it is to just clear a space and get started on purchasing devices and building materials to make things quicker, not having a clear plan for your wine cellar can wind you up with mismatching racks and doors. Or worse, you may overspend on some items and end up compromising important aspects of your wine cellar.
Knowing what results you want before you even get started helps you avoid such problems.
What Is A Root Cellar
If you were to go to Google and ask What is a root cellar the first page youd get is Wikipedia saying that a root cellar is a structure, usually underground or partially underground, used for storage of vegetables, fruits, nuts, or other foods.
In simple terms, a root cellar is the result of digging a deep hole in the ground until its cold and wet.
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Types Of Cooling Unit With Pros And Cons
Here we will break down the 3 different types of cooling unit, along with their pros and cons:
Through-the-Wall, Self-Contained Systems
Through-the-wall units go through the walls, and fit between the wall studs and between rooms.They tend to be self contained units, and are the easiest and cheapest ways to cool your cellar.
Pros:
Some of the best brands of cooling units are WhisperKOOL, Breezaire, and CellarPro.
You can browse our entire range of cooling units on sale here.
Wine Cellar Mistakes To Avoid
The title of this blog post tells you everything you need to know. If you have valuable bottles of wine that need to be stored safely as they age and mature, you need to avoid the kind of mistakes that will cause the wine to deteriorate. This is vital information to understand before building your home wine cellar, and this guide will help you build one that keeps your wine in optimum condition.
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How To Build A Wine Cellar
When building a wine cellar, the wine cellar must be designed and constructed like a refrigerator. Installing a wine cooling system in the wall without converting the room correctly will not work properly and could cause damage to your walls, ceiling and most of your wine. Room preparation of your wine cellar is key to controlling the environmental factors that may negatively affect the storing and aging of your wine. A properly constructed wine cellar will allow you to use the smallest cooling system possible. This article is a brief guide additional information is available in the Wine Storage Education Center.
Please feel free to contact us for any additional information on wine cellar building or wine cellar design. E-mail or call 1 800-876-8789.
Ceiling: The ceiling must have a minimum of R-19 insulation and a vapor barrier.
Floor: concrete ground floors need a vapor barrier only . Any above ground floors need to be R-19 with a vapor barrier.
Survival Food Vs Fresh Garden Produce
I believe its reasonable to infer that if youre interested in underground food storage, youre interested in self-reliance.
Preserving your harvests all winter while off the grid is as self-sufficient as it gets.
Theres a contradiction between long-term survival food and fresh fruits and vegetables.
What is the problem, anyone guess?
Its humidity, in case you were wondering. The air has moisture in it.
The last thing you want with long-term dry survival foods is moisture in the air.
You should do everything you can to keep water away from your dry survival food. Even if it means adding a high-quality dehumidifier to your prep area.
However, with crops that need to be stored for a single winter season, you want the opposite.
You wish for a high degree of humidity .
Freshness and nutrients are preserved in this humid environment. Your stored produce is kept both fresh and nutritious thanks to your high humidity.
All foods keep longer in lower temperatures, as we pointed out in the previous section.
As a result, underground food storage offers both survival food and garden produce optimum conditions for preservation.
So whats a self-reliant person to do?
The way I see it you have a couple of options.
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How To Build A Wine Cellar From Cabin Diy
As this blogger writes, building a wine cellar can be a fun and rewarding project to attempt, but before you begin, you need to know the basics of wine storage, so this tutorial gives you a useful overview. Once thats finished, it then goes on to explain the process of installing a DIY wine cellar in your home, making it a valuable resource for anyone thinking of trying.
How I Built My Wine Cellar
In DIY in general, its always important to learn from experience and its also helpful to learn from the experience of others. Thats why this blog post should be of interest because it gives you the details of how this blogger built a wine cellar in his home. Then, after reading it, youll have a clearer idea of the kind of things to expect when you build one yourself, giving your project a better chance of success.
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Important Factors To Consider For Optimal Wine Cellar Storage
1. Temperature
As previously stated, the best temperature for keeping wines in prime condition is between 45-65 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything that goes beyond that range speeds up the aging process, causes oxidation, and compromises the flavor and aroma of wines.
Since wines are sensitive to temperature fluctuations, it’s important to keep them at a consistently cool storage temperature, which a wine cooling unit can efficiently do.
2. Humidity
Humidity control is crucial for proper wine storage because humidity levels have a significant impact on the corks. When the humidity level is low, the corks can dry up prematurely, allowing large amounts of air molecules to enter the bottle and deteriorate the quality of the wine as a result. If the humidity level is too high, it can damage the corks and can cause mold to grow.
To avoid these from happening, your wine storage should be maintained best at around a humidity level of 50-70 percent.
3. Light
If your wine bottles are exposed to an intense, direct light source, a chemical reaction can occur which can cook and alter the wines flavor. Wines are reactive and vulnerable to lighting, especially the light-bodied ones. So, the lighter the wine, the more care you should take when storing them.
The types of lights to avoid:
- Direct sunlight
- Electric fluorescent
- UV lighting
4. Vibration
Did you know that vibrations can ruin a wines aging process?
5. Other external factors and hazards
Select Your Insulation & Vapor Barrier
There are two common methods for wine cellar insulation and vapor barriers. Spray foam or 6 mil vapor barrier and fiberglass batts. Spray foam is normally more expensive, but it will prevent the possibility of a puncture mark in your vapor barrier caused by someone inserting screws, running wire, plumbing, etc. into or through the wall from outside the wine cellar. With non-shrinking closed cell spray foam the screw will not compromise the enclosure and the foam will expand to fill all the crevices to ensure a tight seal. We do not recommend any specific brand over another, but Comfort Foam is one brand that will work for this application. Ensure there are no air gaps between the insulation and drywall for either method.
After the vapor barrier has been installed you will need to put insulation in the stud and joist cavities. The most common insulation used is fiberglass batts. In a 2×4 wall cavity using fiberglass will provide you with an R-13 insulation value. In a 2×6 wall fiberglass will provide you with an R-19 insulation value. The entire cavity must be fluffed with insulation leaving no air filled cavities.
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How To Build A Wine Cellar Tips For Beginners Novice Contractors Home Designers And Home Owners
Building a modern home wine cellar in Las Vegas is not especially difficult. If you are generally a handy person and comfortable with basic room construction techniques, you can do it yourself.
Having said that, there are several things to understand and get right. Simply attaching some racking and installing a cooling unit through a wall can lead to disaster. Sadly, we are often called in to rebuild residential wine cellars built like this.
Some people choose to hire a general contractor to build out their potential wine cellar room. Unfortunately, we have also seen many disastrous wine cellar installations built this way.
Specialist wine cellar builders usually know what they are doing and may cost more initially however, they can save homeowners many dollars later by avoiding costly remediation work and possibly a ruined wine collection.
Whichever you choose, here is a general guide that should help you get it right.
Turn A Flex Space Into A Wine Room
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Do you have a bonus room at home you dont know how to use? Turn it into a wine room! Take advantage of vertical space with floor-to-ceiling wine racks, cabinetry, or storage hutches. Use darker paint colors to mimic an underground wine cellar. Put up curtains to protect your collection from light. And dont forget to install durable flooring that can handle the weight of the wine bottles!
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The More Insulation The Better For Your Wine Cellar
Building a wine cellar without adequate insulation is also a common problem. Without sufficient insulation of the wine cellar ceiling, walls and floor, temperature changes will occur more frequently and tend to mimic the temperatures of the air surrounding the wine cellar.
In poorly insulated wine cellars, the refrigeration units will spend much more time on and cycle much more frequently, leading to higher electrical costs and more rapid temperature changes and larger temperature range swings.
Also, insufficient insulation will make it less likely you will be able to reach a reasonable target temperature for your cellar. Individual wine cellar refrigeration units typically have published thermal performance data each unit for cellar size, based on insulation, and ambient and desired target temperatures. Below is an example of such a chart for the CellarPro 1800 series of wine cellar cooling units .
Store Wines In The Dining Room
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Imagine hosting a dinner party and being able to choose the perfect wine from the dining room table! Make a statement with a custom wine wall complete with glass doors, temperature control, and floating racks. Or go with a cheaper alternative by building wine shelves into hutches, cabinets, or dressers.
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The Importance Of An Air Sealed Wine Cellar Build
Wine cellar builds should include a air-resistant and moisture-resistant barrier. The lack of an air/vapor barrier will allow warmer, higher-humidity air to enter the cellar space leading to moisture problems.
Warm air can hold more water compared to cooler air. As warm air moves into a cooler space, like a wine cellar, water vapor can condense forming liquid water once it hits its dew point temperature. This water release can quickly lead to structural damage and decay and mold growth. The lack of an air/vapor barrier will also create excessive water production from your cooling unit.
When installing an air/vapor barrier, install it on the warm side of the wine cellar walls, ceiling, and floor. This way, warm ambient air is prevented from entering the cellar or cellar wall or ceiling cavities where it could cool and release water. If the air barrier is placed on the cool side of the cellar, ambient air will be able to move to the barrier, cool and release water behind the barrier. For this wine cellar, I first installed a poly air/vapor barrier, then installed rigid foam insulation over it.
