Wine Cellar Design

What You Need To Consider When Designing A Wine Cellar

If you have a wine collection, or even deciding to join a wine club, you may be deciding on a wine cellar design. Wines can sell for $135,000 per bottle or even higher, so it makes sense to store them correctly. Even if your bottles are under $50, you deserve to feel proud of your collection…mine are and I am! You worked hard to earn the money to buy them in the first place, so now you need a place to maintain them. What’s better than storing them in a wine cellar that you designed yourself?

Getting Started

Before you get down to the really fun stuff, you have some decisions to make. Firstly, wine must be stored at a temperature between 45-65 °F. So choosing a location is extremely important. An active wine cellar is typically a wine cellar that is designed to be highly insulated, offering maximum protection to your wine. Active wine cellars will be the ones you can really design on your own, because they are the ones that are added onto houses as entirely new rooms. Passive wine cellars are most commonly a basement wine cellar design, which will in some ways restrict your ability to design your cellar, because its dimensions are already fixed.

If you’re designing a wine cellar from the ground up, it can be as big or as small as you want. You can design the wine cellar so that you can store a wine collection you feel is completed – and thus you won’t need more space – or you can design a wine cellar with lots of room to grow!

What Can You Include In Your Wine Cellar Design?

In addition to the dimensions, you can also choose to specially design the wine cellar’s shape. Some people choose to build their wine cellars in the shape of a pentagon, which – if measured correctly – can hold 768 bottles of wine in just 130 square feet! With each 20” deep wine rack installed into that space, and 92 inches of height to work with, that fits 18 rows of shelving, even leaving a center row for easy access. Don’t forget that you also have to design your wine cellar around the cooling and humidifying units you’ll have to install. The size of your wine bottles matters as well – you need to account for everything from splits to 750ml to magnums.

Virtually ever component of your wine cellar can be custom designed: layout, door design, storage type. Your doors can be wrought iron or wood, with their own designs or etchings. You can have horizontal or vertical racks installed. You can even go all out and choose to have custom stonework, woodwork or cabinetry installed, depending on how intricate you want to get! It’s all up to you, so don’t be shy and make a bold statement!

Your Wine Cellar Management Is Important

Tips on Managing a Wine Cellar

Wine cellar management is something that you have to learn if you want to keep your expensive vintage wines properly stored and protected. Wines are very sensitive when it comes to storage.

If you so much as fail to keep them in the right temperature, the wine can easily lose its unique flavor.

The first thing you need to do in managing a wine cellar is to create an efficient system for storing your wines. This is particularly important if you have a lot of bottles in your collection.

A good wine cellar management system will allow you to find exactly the wine you need without having to examine every single bottle in your cellar.

Creating a Wine Cellar Management System

There is no single best system to use in wine cellar management because every wine collection is different. Therefore, you have to create your own wine cellar management system based on what kind of wines you plan on collecting, as well as those that are already part of your collection.

One popular way of storing the wines is by region, and another is by the type of grape use. Generally, older wines are stored at the bottom racks of the cellar because these are reserved for special occasions. Younger wines may be placed at more accessible sections of the cellar so that you can easily get one for a regular dinner or picnic.

Using Software for Categorizing Your Wines

In the old days, if you wanted to keep a record of all the wines that you have in your wine cellar, you would have to write down each item in a notebook or record book. But today, wine cellar management is so much easier and more efficient, thanks to software programs specifically made for cataloging different types of wines.

In addition to the name or brand of the wine, the software program can also record the region of the wine, the date you acquired the wine, the type of grape used, and many other details you want to include.

If you are planning on really expanding your wine collection, it would be practical to have such a software program. This way, you will not just be able to record your wines properly, but you will also have an easier time when looking for a particular bottle in your cellar.

If you have a rather small wine collection, you can still benefit by having an organized wine cellar management system. You may not need to buy a software program but it is still useful to keep track of all the bottles that you have in your collection.

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