Curious if anyone has done some math on the costs associated with building and maintaining an active cellar in your home vs offsite storage?
For those of you with home cellars, how much does it cost you over, say, 10 years if you amortize the original cost plus maintenance and repairs and then eventual cooling replacement.
Is there a bottle number and/or time period where it really starts to make sense?
I can run some numbers and put some things together, but figured some of you guys have probably already done that.
I have a cellar since about 2000 I built myself from a spare basement 12x14 room. The cooling unit was probably about $2K back then. Maybe about $1,000 in materials. Currently about 3000 bottles. No idea of cost of yearly electricity costs, but I’m sure still cheaper than storage.
Can’t comment on the costs of building a cellar, but if you’re considering building a home cellar, also look into whether building costs comes in cheaper than a large cabinets like a Le Cache. Building costs vary widely depending on fit, finish and where you are, but just as a data point,
A 622 bottle Le Cache costs $6.7k. That comes out to $2.15/case over a 5 year period, half that over 10 (excluding shipping and yearly electricity costs). But you’re also avoiding any inventorying and handling costs a storage facility may have.
having finally just finished my home cellar after 7+ years without it (all wines stored in offsite during that time) I can tell you a serious intangible cost:
I mean, it all depends on where you live and how much you want to spend on aesthetics. I’ve built an active/passive cellar that leverages our home AC for cooling and holds 53-57F year round with capacity for at least 15000 bottles. The only cost I’ve incurred is some cardboard boxes and now metal shelves (maybe 3-5k) and the cost of keeping our house a few degrees cooler than I might otherwise (maybe 100 a month in electricity) and if the power is out and generator doesn’t work the max temp it’ll get to is 60F in dead summer in a few days (we just replaced AC units on the hottest day of the year)
We just bought a new home, and are putting in wine storage/feature, so I’ve given this some thought. My conclusion: it depends a lot on what your “cellar” is. If the purpose of your cellar is to maximize storage for minimal cost, then the cellar route is probably cheaper. But once you start having professional cellar folks design something that also looks cool (what we’re doing), and is part of the home decor/display, then the price escalates significantly and you start moving well beyond “value” in terms of storage. But there is also the huge value of access to your collection. We are taking our fancy living room – a room few people ever really use – and making one wall of it a wall of wine, putting a bar cart in it, and making it a sitting room for drinks/apps/desert. Hopefully we’ll actually use it this way, and therefore we could use the expense on the wine feature to actually enhance our enjoyment of the home (even if the resale ROI is probably terrible).
Does anyone do a hybrid model of doing a large in home cellar for wines that are ready to drink and/or your “trophy” wines and then having offsite storage for new release wines that need 3+ years of bottle age on them? Or do the in-home cellar people prefer to store everything at home and not do any off-site?
Hybrid. After finishing my wine wall, I’ll have about 2/3 of my wine at home and 1/3 off-site, which I’ll keep in part because it’s also a social/tasting/retail operation. I also have a 500btl cabinet at home. I try to keep longer aging stuff off-site but my allocation is haphazard at best.
Likewise. I’ve got about 1500 bottles at home divided between a home made wine cellar, closet and a few wine fridges and have a 24 case offsite. It’s a pain moving things back and forth to the offsite since it’s just box storage but I try to keep things there that are 5+ years from their drinking window so it helps to keep me from opening them on a whim.
Another nice thing about the offsite is not hearing “you’re buying another wine fridge?”
Hybrid, though heavily weighted toward professional locker storage. It’s much more expensive in the long run to store wines in a facility. If I had a basement, or a bigger house, with space for a dedicated cellar, or larger storage unit(s), I’d do that. Right now, I have a small wine fridge to store 50 bottles at home, keep a few cases lying around that are near term drinkers, and everything else is in a locker.
not factoring electricty is aa mistake. i ran this calculation for my wine fridges and they were circa 10x more pricey than bonded storage, becaause of electricity costs.
Which brings up the stark divide in storage costs between US and UK (no idea about the rest of the world). When you factor in electricity costs you come out ahead with bonded storage - but Henry I’m guessing you’re paying GBP 1 per bottle per year, or less? Not many, if any, folks in the US are paying that little for storage. But good point though - it should be included in the calculations.
Oh, I agree, UK makes it amazing for us to store wine. And you’re correct, my rate including VAT is under £1/year/bottle. Dont quote me on this, but I think I calculated it for my home fridges, and given their electricty consumption alone (ignoring amortisation of the asset), I think they were more like £2-4/bottle/year I think, so whilst not a huge cost still, notably higher.
I’ll try to run the calculations again, but I was really expecting home storage to come out better just on an electricity basis.
Our cellar is a feature within our house - it has space for ~1000 bottles. Depending on your house size / location or expectation at a given price point, the value added to your home by a well designed cellar will significantly outweigh all other factors.
We went with a ONAM water cooled / self contained unit as our water is part of our property taxes. It just plugs right into a regular outlet so it does not use a lot of electricity.
If one can buy fermented grape juice from California or France for over $500 per bottle, the difference between building your home storage or renting external storage seems a rounding error, at most.
Sounds like racing sailboat owners chatting about the cost of a new mainsail.
Friend of mine did the calculation several years ago. It may have changed slightly but essentially it cost two dollars per bottle per year no matter how you do it once you factor everything in.
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