I didn’t do wire racks or diamond shaped racks, I did rectangular bins made of plywood veneered with hardwood. I had calculated the size I wanted as being 12" wide and 13.5" high, which accommodates a dozen Burgundy or up to 16 Bordeaux bottles. The bins against eah long wall are single depth and there are two double depth bins which fill from either side in the middle of the room.
The racks are 6 1/2 feet high and I had extensions on the ends so that if I wanted to lay bottles along the tops they couldn’t roll off. So far I have been using the tops of the racks for trophy bottles, my single malt collection (standing upright) and some magnum storage.
How much you can get in with this design will depend on room size. Mine is just under 14’ x 15’ and will take in excess of 4500 bottles without having to stack anything on the floor. I took away a bit of space from storage by putting a long library table for sorting and unpacking wine and a bookshelf on top for my wine library.
Mine is a ‘working’ cellar. While it looks nice and is neat, the purpose is to house bottles so I can find them, not to be an entertainment or gathering area for guests.
I always log new wine in before it gets put away in a bin.
I always enter and withdrawals on a sheet I keep on the bookshelf in the cellar before the wine leaves the cellar.
It works pretty well. My biggest problem is when I am browsing for a tasting I often pull a bottle or several tentatively and put them on the table. Once I decide what I am serving, it takes me awhile to put them back again as I need to find where they go. Maybe I need to take an ipad into the cellar…
Your layout is very similar to mine, except mine may be 6 to 12" wider. I went with single bottles racks down each side, with one three foot area with racks below and a shelf at about 42". The shelf is now filled with boxes. If I had it to do over again, I would install two deep individual bottle racks one one side, and one side with individual racks above 3 or 4 feet and basic shelving/cubes that could hold boxes, magnums, etc. on the bottom.
Your tastes and buying preferences could shift so I would build in flexibility.
I have never seen the use for single bottle racks. It must be aesthetic considerations as it reduces the number of bottles you can accommodate significantly. In fact I’ve had a couple of friends set up what they perceived to be ‘show’ cellars that later had to be overhauled and the single bottle sections deleted for bins to take the extra cases of wine stacked on the floor that they had sworn they would never, never accumulate.
The ‘show’ cellars I have seen that never needed revision included one Asian client who had the cellar built, placed one order with a local store for a huge amount of wine (based on Parker scores being at least X) and then almost never drank a bottle out of it - he really wasn’t a wine fan, he just thought he needed to have a wine cellar because all his buddies had one. IIRC, he also kept the temperature neat house ambient as he didn’t like his friends getting chilled when they went in to ooh and aah over the cellar.
That guy would never need to change his layout, but real wine aficionados will do themselves a favour and be realistic about future chances for expansion and plan from the beginning.
Maybe it is because I had a cellar with inadequate space for many years (Bordeaux boxes stacked six high in multiple rows because there was no more bin space and finding a specific bottle was an enormous effort accompanied by a significant uncertainty that I would be able to locate a given bottle.
How would you all set up a cellar if space wasn’t really a consideration? I have two rooms that are 12 x 8 x 8 and 25 x 25 x 8 so I can probably put bottles in whatever configuration without hitting any sort of space limitation.
It doesn’t have much to do with aesthetics for us - our cellar is quite utilitarian - it has to do with ease of access more than anything. And a little about the fun of browsing. It is much, much easier to nip downstairs and quickly pull a particular bottle I want out of the racks, or browse the white burgundy racked section (pulling out several bottles to consider which to drink, maybe check how colors are looking) than it is to go after bottles that are in stacked cases, or even in boxes/cases on shelves. When I want to retrieve wine from bulk storage, unless it’s a daily drinker which is loose in bins, I might have to move a lot of boxes to get at what I want, or reach up to a high shelf for something pretty heavy. Even with the loose bins, I have to be careful that anything I remove doesn’t cause a cascade. So we use the rectangular bins and the open stack-it-on-the-floor space for wine in need of significant time, or wine that we have a lot of and keep the “extra” (more than 12) in boxes, and put the more ready to drink wines and wines that we have 12 of or less in the racks. Of course, we are lucky to have a good sized space, so we can have plenty of both kinds of storage. Both very useful.
Wow! Lucky guy. You could put whites, bubblies and your wine library in the small room and reds in the larger one (or vice versa if you are a white keener).
Depending on how much wien you anticipate having you could do what a friend did - have racks against the walls with bays and racks that came out from a wall maybe 5-6 feet, setting aside sections.Very open, the shelving all furniture grade and the cost of the racking probably exceeded what many have in wine. Very open and with a large table with seats in the centre. Would need a suitably large sized cooler (or two smaller ones) to keep at temp. Some nice brickwork arches and stuff as well, and a dedicated computer just for keeping the cellar program (or accessing CT, I forget what he used).
I have a separate bar so the cellar won’t be an area for entertaining; I just want it relatively easy to find bottles and a practical setup for storage. I think the small room could be good for cases and owc, more long term storage.
We’ve finally got a room in our new place we’ve dedicated to a cellar and are finalizing our buildout as well. Ours isn’t for entertaining (it’s 55 degrees, who wants to hang out down there?!?) but we’ve built in a little elbow room as well and while it feels nice when you’re in there picking something out to have with dinner, I think the real utility of a little extra room is when we’re in there racking larger quantities of new wine. We try and organize by region/type and not having to constantly move and reconfigure the boxes we’re unloading just to get stuff into the racks is really nice. It’s definitely limiting our maximum capacity, but loading the cellar back up after adding some new racking was a breeze, and we both like tooling around in there so it allows for one of us to pick or rack while the other sips on something and “supervises” If you’re mostly going to be in there solo and/or aren’t reconfiguring or trying to rack a bunch of stuff at once though, by all means pack it in!
I’d agree. All you need is rack labelling to be able to find anything quickly, and the use of a program like CT to keep track of the locations. I use a three symbol location system. The first numeral is the rack number (I have six racks (to are double deep so get different numbers depending on which side we are talking about) the second is a letter for the row, with A being the top row and F being bottom, and the final locator is another number indicating which cube the wine is in. Thus a wine in 2f6 is in the sixth cube along from the door in the second rack and the bottom row (stick on labels at the end of the racks helps)
Maximum storage density requires long rows and the spacing in my cellar is 31" between racks, though you can vary that to suit - I just decided that I needed bins deep enough to have the whole bottle inside and then divided up my available space evenly to suit. An inch or two either way should still give enough room to move around, bend over to search and fill bins and find stuff easily.
Don’t forget to install adequate lighting and use cool LEDs instead of incandescents to avoid adding heat, and insulate the heck out of the ceiling, which many people seem to neglect - the heat transfer there is large (I had the whole interior of the cellar spray foam insulated before the drywall went in).
And if you are using wooden racking, be sure to screw them to the floor through the bottom before you fill them to prevent accidents from large clumsy people or earthquakes.
I also suggest that you have square strips of closed cell foam insulation cut to position under those long thin necked bottles like Alsatian/German, as the will want to tip and deposit themselves on your floor, otherwise. I had a large sack of those cut and haven’t yet used all of them (some Burgundy bottles, or those stupidly - sorry, ‘stylishly’ tapered California Cab bottles also stack so they can teeter if you don’t use the insulation blocks to stack them one in, one out, alternating.
There are so many questions I have and most of them revolve around what your goals are with storing wine. Do you want to buy & age Barolo, Bordeaux, and Burgundy for 20+ years or is this mostly storage for your daily drinkers? You mention you don’t have a significant amount of Champagne…but what is your exposure to Champagne? In my experience it’s more likely that you’ll shift and realize that you like Champagne the more different & new wines that you try. Not a matter of if, but when. I didn’t really care about Champagne for the first 15-16 years. Today it’s in my top 5 regions in my cellar. How many bottles are you hoping to have for storage? If you’re drinking mostly “daily drinkers” then it would seem that there is no need to store more than 2-4 cases of daily drinkers in the cellar at a time if you’re planning to open them within the first year of drinking.
Champagne is frustrating in a lot of ways for storage. Right now mine is mostly sitting in the Le cache or in the cellar in domaine cases stacked to the ceiling. Finding racking to fit the different bottles isn’t easy.
Your comments about being able to pull bottles to help decide what to drink and check color is the main reason I’m struggling with idea of doing double deep. I buy most wines in 3’s and 6’s so the double deep racking won’t be primarily the same wine in the same bin.
I’ve asked for Wine Racks Of America’s opinion on the most capacity with no diamonds and one shelf for case storage.
One question for those that have racks that meet in a corner. Doing the curved corner racks is a big space waster in a space like mine. How did you deal with the gap created by the two racks coming together on an inside corner without using a curved corner? It seems like an empty spot that items could fall in and be tough to retrieve.
I followed a lot of John’s advice in building my own cellar so I agree with a lot of it. Leaving space on top of the racks for whole case storage has been especially (and surprisingly) useful.
In your space, I would do the large wall across from the door in double deep standard racks. The standard racks I have hold almost everything I buy, even most grower Champagne.
Then I would put single deep magnums on the left and single deep champagne on the right.
If you like big house grand marques Champagne (except Cristal), they won’t fit in anything except magnums.
I think diamond and bin racks are useless unless you have a lot of old school Bordeaux bottles.
I can see how that might make things different. We don’t have any racks where two different wines are in the same slot, one behind the other, but we have enough space that we can afford the luxury of making double-deep into single-deep where we only have one of a wine. One added amusement of the double/single thing is that we’re always very excited when we “get a free slot” - that is, when we decide to drink a single wine taking up a double slot, and so now have 2 free spaces. We sometimes even use “getting a slot” as the reason to drink one wine over another when we’re on the fence.
Of course, it’s not really all that difficult to pull out the front bottle and reach the back one. I think if you are buying 3’s and 6’s, it would still make sense, less so if you buy singles a lot. Maybe buy 4’s and 6’s.
As far as organization goes, I’d give a lot of consideration to what kind of mapping will make you happy, because changing it after the fact is a bit-h. I know plenty of people are just fine with bottles in any old place, with a code (row/column) in CT to allow them to find everything. That would drive me insane. I LOVE being able to stand in front of the champagne section, for instance, and browse. Plus, it would make me nutty, if I have 6 bottles of something, to have them spread out all over the cellar. On the other hand, my way take more maintenance, which I’m sure would bother a lot of folks. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the other way, but for me it would be a nightmare. I’d figure out which you are beforehand.
Double deep doesn’t mean like a wine cooler where you have to pull out bottles to reveal the back rows. It means that you have a double thick rack accessible from both sides (the racks on the walls are single depth only). No idea why it insists on putting the image on its side… That’s a wall of Rhones on the left and a wall of Bordeaux on the right (or it would be if the picture posted properly)
The only decoration is this stained glass light I couldn’t pass up.
![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
If you’re mostly going to be in there solo and/or aren’t reconfiguring or trying to rack a bunch of stuff at once though, by all means pack it in!
