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!

Do You Want To Start Your Own Wine Tasting Club?

Guidelines on Establishing a Wine Tasting Club

Establishing your own wine tasting club may seem like a very ambitious plan at first but when you take time to think about it, you’ll realize that it really is not that difficult.

All you really need is an interest in wine and a handful of friends with the same interest, and you’ll already be halfway there.

The main purposes of a wine tasting club is to educate the members on the different types of wine from all over the world, and to give them an opportunity to taste the wines first-hand. But before you can enjoy these experiences, you first have to build the club by following these guidelines:

Ideally, a wine tasting club should have anywhere from 10 to 30 members. If you like to keep the meetings intimate and cozy, you’ll want to stick to fewer members, but if you don’t mind a slightly more rambunctious group, it’s perfectly fine to invite more people. After all, having too few members may be quite boring in the long run.

Assign Equal Tasks to Wine Tasting Members

For a wine tasting club to meet its purposes, meetings of all members will have to be held on a regular basis. Members should take turns when it comes to hosting duties. However, no matter who is hosting a meeting, you should make it clear to all members that everyone should participate in preparing for the meetings.

Delegate tasks such as preparing the food, picking up the wines, and preparing a talk on the featured wine. Your wine tasting club will be a success only if everybody pitches in.

Limit the Number of Wines in Each Tasting Session

The objective of wine tasting sessions is to enjoy the different tastes of wine, not to get drunk. Therefore, it’s a smart idea to limit the amount of wine that your club members will sample during a session. Experts suggest that you limit each session to six types of wine.

Wine and Cheese

It is also recommended that you include various intermissions in between tastings to give people time to clear their head of the alcohol. Excellent intermissions are brief discussions about the wines and sampling of cheeses and other light foods.

Finally, remember that a wine tasting event is supposed to be fun so no matter how serious you are about this activity, don’t forget to enjoy yourself as well.

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