I didn’t check WRA, but had no complaints about pricing from Apex. The quality is excellent. The racks do take time to assemble. Mine came in tall panels that needed cross pieces nailed on the front and back. I have a pneumatic brad nailer, so that part went quickly.
68 degrees Doc??? ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
No. My cellar has been 50. It’s off now, house being tented today. That was humidity—68%, not temp
Shouldn’t this be in the weight fitting thread? ![[training.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/d/d0f39866e5714408d7091b0bd2d7bb764d7bb973.gif "[training.gif]"){kind=small}
So I confirmed with Vigilant that their standard racking fits Burg bottles. Not really excited about the DIY assembly but not sure if I have better choices. They have nice design software online.
Anyone use Vigilant? Thoughts?
So for big bins, I, unlike a certain Sarah who had the forethought to buy most of her wine in Base 12 
, have tons of ones and twos and threes and a relatively smaller number of cases and OWC 3- and 6-packs. Worried about the difficulty of finding things with big bins, even if more versatile overall. How do bins help?
I built more Magnum sized bins( all double deep) than I needed, but found many Champagne bottles too big for regular bins fit just fine in the Mag slots.
Also had the carpenter cut pieces of veneer that slide along the side rails of each bin. With those in place you can convert a Mag slot into a regular 750 space as needed.
Yeah. The buyers of my home ripped out the cellar to build a nicer space for their nanny.
I guess nanny rooms are the new wine cellars.
I fully expect that my cellar will be converted into a nanny/housekeeper space when I’m gone. In fact, I had the space plumbed for a potential future conversion.
Noah, i bought my racking from IWA and my contractor put it together. I used apex for my first cellar and I prefer the current racking. I got rid of diamond bins as they are lousy for burgundy and riesling and loire wine and that’s at least 80% of my cellar. Why don’t you come over and look at it and see what you think?
Would love to!
I used Wine Cellar Innovations. Did open bins for OWC and bottles at the bottom with double deep on the top. They did a nice job
We use Vigilant at the store. Excellent racking and they will even do the design work if you send them the dimensions and ideas. The individual racks are great for display and access in our “show room” and in cellars with limited space. We also have some bins in the display area which very work well. My storage in the back is built with 2X6 lumber for shelving and uprights and 2x4 framing. (10 foot ceiling). The uprights are 4 feet apart. There is a floor deck on 2x3 lumber, the first shelf is at 4 feet, the next two at 29 inches. Wood boxes and unopened cases get stacked on the floor deck. Each 48" x 29" cubicle holds 6 cases of wine with the boxes on their side, essentially looking like racking with adequate space to add a flush set of doors to protect the wine during earthquakes. The cubicle will hold 9 to 12 cases stacked upright, depending on the size of the bottles but accessibility in a store environment is more important than it would be in a home cellar. I built a magnum rack out of 1x4 and 2x2 lumber. It could be built to any height. I also built some display racks from OWCs set at 20 degree cant on 1x4 legs.
Almost 20 years ago, I put in racks from Rose Hill Wine Cellars. They’re redwood, individual bottle racks that are stackable, double-able, and have some of the problems that have been stated - hard to fit Burgundy or Champagne bottles. Looking at what Rose Hill offers today, I see they now have some additional options for these types of bottles.
I went with Rose Hill because they were the best price at the time. The exchange rate between the US & Canadian $ worked in my favor. One thing I found was it didn’t make sense to order only one kit, because the shipping, customs clearance, etc. was high. The shipping for 8 kits was very reasonable.
They assembled very easily, but I highly recommend using (buying, renting, or borrowing) a brad nailer for the construction. It’s much faster and easier on the wood than nailing by hand.
Here’s a link Modular Redwood Wine Racks | Redrack | Rosehill Wine Cellars
To be clear, a large part of my cellar is small quantity - I didn’t always purchase in case quantities, and I certainly can’t always afford it - so a very large portion of the cellar is racking, double-deep, with slot sizes customized by bottle type to a certain extent. The bins, which rectangular like normal shelves and are along most of one wall, floor to almost ceiling, hold: some cases (mostly champagne 6 packs which need more time, or are the “extra” after putting 6 into racks), OWCs, large bottles (3L and bigger), magnums in wooden boxes that we want to keep, Riesling magnums (not worth trying to customize rack slots for these), bocksbeutels from Franken (fit nicely several deep), a few other odd shapes (sekt magnums, for instance), and what I will call “overflow.”
What is overflow? Those are wines we have bought in quantity, that are pretty much ready to drink and we pull regularly, and which would be too much of a pain to shelve. Our cellar is organized regionally, then by producer, wine, and vintage which makes finding a wine incredibly easy, but can be a pain to maintain. A little shifting around for a new vintage isn’t hard. Putting in a whole new column for 3 cases of Vallana Gattinara is a lot more difficult. So we have a few bins that hold the quantity wines, which CT notes as being in back storage (not that we’d forget). We also have a speed rack up front that we use for randomly acquired ones or twos which we don’t want to bother filing correctly.
Whether or not bins are helpful will depend on your cellar needs. We never have any trouble finding things in the bins, because none of them hold assorted loose bottles. Okay, maybe in the Franken section, but there aren’t that many and the labels face out. I tend to think any new cellar should have some bins, since many collectors will have at least some of the bin needs I listed above, but totally up to you. If you are pretty sure you’ll never accumulate champagne 6 packs or OWCs or large bottles, and if you don’t have a racking regime like we do (it would drive me absolutely crazy not to have all of a given wine in the same place, or in two places at most, like 6 in racks and the rest in the bins), then maybe you don’t need them. I value the versatility.
Like you, I don’t have ≥6 of very many wines, so I’m not a fan of large bins. They are more space efficient than double-deep individual slots only if you have 6 or more of a lot of wines. If you have mostly 1s through 4s and don’t want to mix wines in a single bin because of the hassle of pulling from the bottom, bins are less efficient than double deep racking. And keep in mind that not all bottles stack well (e.g. Champagne and Burgundy-shaped bottles).