Thinking of having your own private wine cellar? A wine cellar is a room of cool temperature, and with an inviting ambience. It’s a place to store wine and kept it safe.
- Wine cellars are no longer just for the rich and famous or the swankiest restaurants. With a little elbow grease, and some planning you can construct a wine cellar in your basement or shed, equipped it with custom wine racks to store all the bottles you either collect or home-brew.
There are some advantages to having your own wine cellar. Wine ages with time. Some of the wines when they have aged to perfection become prohibitively expensive, because wine changes as it ages. If you have your own wine cellar, you can purchase young wines from local or long-distance wineries, and store them on your wine racks, charting the progress of the bottle-aging process. Then once it reaches full maturity, you can call your friends and loved ones to your side, pull a bottle out of your wine rack, pouring sweetness for all.
If you have access to your own wine cellar, you can shop online or locally for different wine to fit any occasion. Then when something special comes along that you wish to celebrate. You merely need to go downstairs to your wine rack(s) and pull out the appropriate vintage to fit the occasion. Buying in bulk, the young wines, you will find will save you money. They will mature under your watchful eye and you will be able to enjoy their freshness and bouquet when the time is right. Also, wine makes an excellent choice as a gift for a host or hostess. If you find you just don’t want to drink all the wines you have, you can always offer the wine for sale to other wine connoisseurs
So how do you go about locating the perfect place for your wine cellar?
Keep the following tips at hand to guide you.
- Select an area that is cool and away from the main traffic areas of your home.
- Consider access and availability; how often will you be visiting this wine cellar?
- Are you also going to have a tasting room off to the side of this wine cellar?
- Consider the lighting; you want the wine bottles to be kept stored in the dark. Indirect lighting is best
- Mentally calculate the physical arrangement of the wine cellar. How many bottles do you think you will collect/store? How many wine racks will you have there?
What type of wine rack will you be purchasing? They come in all types of materials. There are basically two types, the wine racks to store the wine bottles and wine racks to display the bottles.
Some of the materials that comprise wine racks are stackable plastic wine racks, wine racks made of redwood and other woods, and iron wine racks, both plain and ornamental. One local restaurant here in town, the building used to be an annex for the post office. When you walk through the hallways of this Italian restaurant, you can see in every Post Office Box, a wine bottle.
Temperature plays the most important part of wine storing. All wines should be stored in temperatures between 8-15 degrees Celsius that translates to 46 -59 degrees Fahrenheit.