My closet was definitely warmer, on average than David’s space. What he describes is probably fine for most wines, even for several years. They’ll be ready a lot sooner, and the evolution will be somewhat different, but I don’t think they should be “damaged” as mine were.
Hi all,
I’ve got a cellar temp question and so far consulted these WB threads on the matter:
This one was the most useful so far, so I decided to post here.
There’s a heat jam in my passive cellar. I store both fine wines and daily chuggers in it. Some of it from recent vintages, some 20 years+. Temp’s currently at 19°C (66,2 Fahrenheit) in the wine cellar, approaching 20°C (when I started measuring it was at 20). Outside it’s only 21°C, so some construction work in the basement must have permanently increased the basement’s temperature.
Anyway, I noticed that airing the house at the right times reduces the wine cellar temperature. I was wondering about your take on this. Does aeration interfere too much with the humidity or is that a legit way to bring down the temperature to something like 17°C?
Thanks!
Do you mean opening windows in the cellar? When? In the winter? You should really have a temperature and humidity gauge. The general answer is “it depends”
Thanks for this.
I have a thermometer in the wine cellar.
The wine cellar’s window does not lead outside but to the vestibule (there’s no daylight exposure). The door of the wine cellar connects to the rest of the basement.
I meant opening the window and door of the wine cellar whilst aerating the basement and the floor above the basement when degrees outside are below 20°C. I noticed that such a cool draft brings down the temperature in the wine cellar as well.
Does that answer your question?
That seems fine but I think you need to address the reason why your basement is warmer than the rest of the house; it shouldn’t be due to heat in the summer.
Great, thanks!
I misphrased this: The basement isn’t warmer but I need to get in fresh air through the floor above the basement and in the basement to decrease the temperature
Open the vents in the early morning and take advantage of what nature has to offer. European cellars have always done this.
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This doesn’t sound like a basement at all, which might be the reason why some members are confused.
If just opening a door into this basement leads to a drop in temperature, by definition that makes the space above cooler than this “basement”. In any “classic” European hose a basement would never be warmer than the floor above it, and the basement would be at least halfway under ground.
This sounds more like some newer project with the weird “basement” configurations that aren’t really basements?
Be that as it may, what you really want to know is both high and lows, and how quickly they change. You want to record for a full year to get a good idea of how the space behaves.
Generally speaking, a swing of 1°C or less in a day is ideal, and you want a slow seasonal change from winter to summer, say, from 13°C in winter to 19°C in summer. Humidity isn’t anywhere near as important as you might think as long as it stays above 20%.
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I open the windows to the rest of my basement on summer nights when the temps outside will be lower than the basement’s daytime temp. That does seem to help my passive cellar indirectly.
For example, the basement temp was 76F Friday, with outside highs in the high 80s and 90s. After two nights with the windows open, the basement is running about 73F, even though it continues to be hot outside. And the wine room has only risen a degree over this hot week (to 66F), even though I was in an out of there a number of times. I think it would have stayed at around 65F if I hadn’t opened the door so many times.
My wine room is extremely well insulated, but the foundation walls are partly above ground. And I learned along the way that concrete is fairly good heat conductor. That includes the basement floor. That’s why I try to keep the basement temp down.
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Another factor I would add: I keep my wine in (mostly cardboard) boxes, not on racks for individual bottles. Although the summer air temp in the wine room is usually 65-66F, when I aim my thermometer gun at bottles, they are only at 62-63F. The insulation of the boxes plus thermal mass works in my favor.
So, with a passive cellar, I would not store bottles where they are open to the air.
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Maybe the high, but it’s not at the temp continuously or your wine would eventually get to that temp also. If it’s cooler at night and rises during the day, insulation and thermal mass can help keep temps down for a while.
My wine fridge cooler went out and it took the better part of a week for the wine inside to reach ambient temperature. Even days later it was still 10 degrees cooler than ambient.
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[RIP John!]
I’d been looking for research on this and found an article by wine consultant Clark Smith, who wrote:
In my thesis, I explored how clever this organism is. It has an array of strategies for causing secondary infection on the backs of other organisms, emerging only after Saccharomyces cerevisiae primary fermentation is done. It’s very well equipped to come on after that and then to hide out. To begin with, it has a very slow growth habit. Even under ideal conditions, colonies only emerge on agar plates after eight days, whereas Saccharomyces emerges within a day. It really likes heat and goes into hibernation below 59 °F (15 °C), and so you can have it in a cold cellar but it won’t actually show up until the wine, after bottling, is warmed to room temperature. Then often you’ll end up with a Brettanomyces bloom in the bottle. It’s very common.
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I’m not sure what you mean by “maybe the high.” There’s very little variation in my cellar over the course of a day. It’s a pretty steady 65-66 for a couple of months.
I think we’re making the same point – that temperature equalization takes time, as your cooler example shows. My point was that it takes even longer if the wine is in a box with other bottles below the air temp – the process is so slow that the bottle temps lag the air temp even after a month of air temps in the mid-60s.
I’m not sure I would go that far. I’m guessing the wine is either a little warmer or the temps get a little cooler at night than you realize. The delta isn’t going to be that far off after a month.
Thanks Edvards, just to clarify:
This is a European cellar since it is a cellar located below ground in a European house. That being said, the house has an open layout so the ground floor is directly connected to the cellar. The cellar is still the coldest floor of the house (colder than ground floor). However, due to some construction that affected the cellar’s vents, there now seems to be a problem that cold air from outside can’t enter the cellar.
Ty for your advice concerning humidity, that’s really good to know.
And thanks, @John_Morris I’ll try to open windows when the outside temperature is below the basement’s daytime temp. Great advice!
Haven’t read the entirety of the post but wanted to add that my in-laws live in Switzerland and have a passive cellar in the basement of the house. My father-in-law collected and drank red Burgundy and red Rhone wines for many, many decades. I have been fortunate to have had some really special wines over the last 30+ years. The cellar was always humid, and in the warmest summer months would reach 24 degrees Celsius (75F) for several weeks. And of course, the cellar got pretty cold in the winter months. Many of the wines that I had that were 40+ years old, and a handful quite older, never suffered one bit from the storage conditions. Most were purchased on his bi-annual trips to producers he got to know well through the years and sat undisturbed.
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Refrigeration systems did not become a thing until the 20th century. ChatGPT tells me that people enjoying aged wine goes back further.
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I have a digital temperature gauge that samples hourly, and there are essentially no variations over a 24-hour period if the door isn’t opened.
I insulated it to about R-48 (it varies a little on different surfaces), so the variation over longer periods depends mainly on the changes in the temperature of the concrete foundation walls and the concrete floor (which is affected by the rest of the basement). Needless to say, those changes are transmitted slowly.
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My cellar is 64 in summer and 70 during the heating season because the furnace is down there. I feel like the 64 is fine, though the 70 gives me some pause. That said, I put my nicer bottles in the wine fridge and the overflow in the cellar. No problems yet, but I’ve only been in the house a couple years
Cellar temp was consistently at 19°C over the last couple of weeks but then climbed somehow to almost 21°C over the span of two days (no idea why, the temperature outside didn’t change much). Temperatures finally cooled down outside and leaving the basement’s windows open during the night and opening the door of the wine cellar brought the wine cellar’s temp down to 18°C! So thanks for the recommendation.
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