I’m tired of having my wine offsite and am finally having professional cellar built by a very reputable specialist.
Two questions for people with cellars:
(1) I’m going to be using lacquered (sic) ash. Has anyone had an issue with or heard of an issue with that non-oil based treatment affecting wine?
(2) Any advice along the lines of – if, I had it to do over again, I’d…
I had a do-it-yourself cellar in my previous home but have stored it for the past 5 years since moving to CT. As great as I think the folks at Horse Ridge are, it’s getting old…
I agree with Kirk on the racking for odd bottles and magnums - you can never have enough as they will always accommodate a standard bottle as well, if need be.
Also for me, to use 2x6 wall construction rather than 2x4. Really not sure why I didn’t do that in the first place.
Well, I do have a chance to do it all over at a second home location. This time I am building a small closet. As soon as you open the wood framed glass insert door, the single row up and down of racks will be in front of you. It’ll be rather small, but perfect size for the apartment with 10+ foot ceilings. The thing I will do differently is that the shelving will be wood panels with no dividers or bars. They’ll just be adjustable flat shelves. Also, I will inset into the wall a cabinet channel that allows for those metal shelf clips. This will allow me to vary my shelf spacing size as needed for bottle size and to allow the shelves to have some pitch or incline. If I find bottles rattle or roll too much I will put down foam rubber shelf liner. I haven’t figured out if I want some type of pull out rack or cabinet on the bottom. At the very top I may put in a stack of half shelves for splits to allow for access up there. Finally, I will put in a split system with the inside unit up in the ceiling. I’ll have two recessed lights (maybe LED, maybe not) with a switch outside the closet. I have a picture of someone elses unit for looks, but it does not have the variable flat shelving. I think the small square stock isn’t necessary in my application. I’ll post the photo and hope the author of the photo doesn’t mind. Recommendations and advice is welcome.
Don’t waste space for tables, chairs, etc. Few friends will want to hang out in a 55 degree room.
Especially this.
Except that unless you’re really expecting to buy a lot of sparkling wine or magnums, I wouldn’t worry about too much space for those. Over 30 years it’s never been something I bought or drank a lot of. Burgundy/Rhone bottles are definitely an issue though, and bins are a pain for those.
I’d also slightly angle the bottles towards the back so that they’re not exactly horizontal. If you do have to stack, especially in a bin, that is a lot more useful than having them slide out on you and if there’s a minor tremor, you have a slight bit of protection if the bottles aren’t perfectly horizontal.
I don’t know what you’re worried about with lacquer. You don’t need any finish at all if you don’t want one.
Thanks Brian! It’s a small space, a tool closet in my garage which I modified to my needs. I have about 2k bottles in it, but it’s really overfilled beyond its comfortable capacity.
Cheers
Warren
For sure. My homemade racks made from unfinished cedar decking are 12 years old and still look nearly new.
I’ve settled on a mix of case-sized and individual bins. The case sized bins get you better bottle density. The individual bins are for bottles that don’t play well with others (champagne, german, and oversized pinot come to mind first).
To give you a baseline, I ordered from Wine Racks America, which worked out to about $3.50/bottle (all individual slots, most double deep). I had to assemble and I put my own finish on, so adding a fair amount of time.
If that’s an all-in price, I think you’re doing okay. If you have to assemble and install, I suspect you could get lower.
I don’t mean to be rude, and I sincerely hope that that particular cellar is sitting atop a highly stable geology [wherever it is], but if if a 5.0 Richter tremor were to pass through that neighborhood, then that entire cellar is gonna be rendered into so much broken glass lying on the floor.
Which is the kinda thing that guys in California & Washington State & Alaska & Hawaii need to be obsessing about.
Even guys in places like Missouri & South Carolina, which have histories of very nasty quakes, need to be keeping that in mind when they design their cellars.
The earthquake topic is one I continue to consider. It is one of the reasons I like my offsite at Wine Bank. There I have my wine in boxes on metal shelves with a metal door that completes the tight quarters. At home where I keep a few, there is a risk but my cellar is only about four feet high with a cushioned floor where the better bottles are stored near the floor. I have thought about installing drapes of roll down netting that is used in commercial storage, but haven’t done so yet.
Depending on your use case it might make sense to put a table in your cellar if you have the space. I’ve put one in mine for things like standing up old Barolo bottles for sediment settling before decanting. I feel much better having bottles standing up on a table in the cellar when compared to leaving them standing up on the floor. Plus when the day arrives for me to open the bottle to decant off the sediment I do everything in the cellar and don’t move the bottle (other than to pour). I’ve done this process a couple times and I can tell you the amount of wine left behind with the sediment was absolutely minimal at best. The most recent case was the best result I’ve ever had in a decanting off sediment process from a leftover liquid perspective. Sadly, the wine itself (1964 F. Rinaldi Barolo) was oxidised.
Yeah, this is one of those tastes things. I wish I’d installed more half-bottle racking, as I’ve collected a few of those that well exceed the 2% of slots I have allocated to them. Magnum racks are still half empty (about 3% of racking). It all depends on what you tend to buy.
