Build Your Own Wine Rack

Storing your wine properly is very important. Improperly stored wine will not age correctly and not increase in value. You don’t have to break the bank when buying a wine rack. This is many times an issue if you desire to keep your overhead low on your wine cellar. Figure out what you want your wine rack to look like first, and how much you want to spend. Your wine racks should be of good quality because you want them to last for a long time.

The worst thing that could happen is not having enough space for your wine rack. When storing your wine, make sure it is in the correct environment. Don’t forget the big three when storing your wine: temp, light, humidity. Heat and light are wines worst enemies. Heat will cause the wine to age too fast and become ruined. Keep the wine temperature from rising and falling more than necessary. Unless you have one of the new style corks, wine should be stored on its side to keep the cork wet. If you already have your diy wine cellar constructed, then you are well on your way.

A Monthly Wine club takes all the work out of finding the best wines as you grow your collection as time goes by. Any true wine afficionado knows that good wine cannot sit under the cupboard forever. Many wine racks are designed to make the most out of the available space. They let you store many bottles of wine on each shelf. Reading of wine labels and finding different bottles is quick and easy as well. Metal wine racks and wooden wine racks make excellent choices. You can get a discount by buying wine by the crate. Look around for a wine rack design you like, and then build it yourself to limit spending.

A DIY wine rack is probably the cheapest option out there. It is not difficult to make a wood wine rack, it also impresses the wife. All that is required are some standard tools and some free wine rack plans you can find anywhere on the internet. You can build a racking system for under ten dollars if you wanted to.

Likely the cheapest option is to build your rack with wood and bricks. Just stack the bricks and planks for a simple rack that will make due until you get a proper one. You make the call how expensive your wine racks will be. Making a budget wine rack is a great cheap and easy option that is simple to do for anybody. Visit the wine cellar website to see other money saving tips.

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This post was written by wine on April 30, 2009

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Easy Wine Cellar Design

When you are passionate about wine you begin collecting it. It could be you sign up for a wine club and now are bringing in valuable wines. Many times you will end up with more wine than you can handle, storage can become an issue. A pantry can smoothly be converted into a very handy custom wine cellar to protect your highly prized wine collection.

Be sure you spend plenty of time taking the important details into consideration. For instance where is the closet in relation to the rest of the house? Avoid converting a closet against an outside wall into a wine cellar. Temperature, temperature, temperature, outside walls make it very hard to keep this steady as they face the elements. Choose an internal closet where your wine can be stored in a more stable atmosphere.

A critical part to storing wine is monitering the temperature changes that could take place. You don’t have to maintain a perfect temperature at all times, it can vary a little, as long as it is a gradual change. The same change each day will harm your wines by ageing them too rapidly. When the temperature flucuates wine becomes shocked, the rule is steady constant temperature with no or minimal variations.

It’s easy to spot. Look for the sticky deposit that often forms around the capsule. The repeated changes in temperature of the wine will fragment the cork. As the temperature rises and falls, it is as if you were removing and replacing the cork each time. When this happens, minute quantities of wine may be pushed out along the edge of the cork allowing air to seep back in. The process of oxidation cannot be stopped once the wine contacts oxygen. Your wine is ruined. Keeping the temperature the same year round is hard but keeping it a comfortable 54-57 degrees is just fine. Higher temperatures will age wine more rapidly and cooler temperatures will slow down the ageing process. Irreversible damage will be done if your wine is kept at a temperature above 82ºF for even a month.

You don’t want moisture to build up. Mold like the humid environments that are good for wine. Also think about a little better wine cellar cooler for management of the humidity and temperature.

The designs are beautiful, no detail is left out. Carry that same dedication over to the next phase: wine cellar construction. Making a wine cellar can be fun! You will need to purchase a few essential items. Purchase some inexpensive wine racks from a hardware store or online retailer or storage shop. With some cheap racks you’ll have a simple but very effective mini wine cellar. Wine rack designs will vary in bottle density. Price variations are more to do with aesthetics than efficiency. Individual racking is the most convenient for selecting bottles.

Make your wine cellar with scalability in mind, only put the racks on one side, leaving the other side empty. Then you may still have floor or shelf space available for wines that you purchase by the case. Constructing a custom wine cellar on a budget is simple and easy at home. Let your wine speak for itself. If building your own cellar is too daunting then you might want a Cuisinart Dual Zone 15 Bottle Wine Cellar.

Be sure to delight in your newly created wine cellar!

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This post was written by wine on April 29, 2009

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Are wine glasses really important?

It is a popular belief that the glass you use to serve a fine wine is almost as important to how much you enjoy the drink as the wine itself. The shape, colour and fabric of wine glasses are all supposed to influence the way you appreciate the flavour and aroma of a wine. Whether there is really much truth to this or not remains to be seen but there are some convincing arguments that a wine really does taste better if drunk from the right glass.

So how do we know which ones are the best to use? With so many different glasses out there it’s hard to know which ones will be the best. Most people agree that a specially dseigned glass is needed for certain types of wine. The most common example of this is tall, thin flute-shaped glasses for champagne which are designed to retain the ‘fizziness’ in sparkling wines by reducing the surface area at the top of the glass. A serious wine enthusiast will also use different glasses for red and white wines – a rounder, wider bowl for reds to allow more space for the wine to breathe, and a slightly smaller, tulip-shaped bowl to help keep whites cool.

But some take this theory a lot further. Real wine geeks claim the difference between wines runs a lot deeper than just the colour, and that for each different variety of wine there is a glass designed specifically to enhance the experience of drinking it. No one has taken this further than Austrian wine glass manufacturer Riedel, the company that came up with the idea. They actually produce different glasses not only for different types of wine, but also for all the different varieties and vintages within each type – although not many people could afford to collect the whole set!

As for what the glass is made from, lots of people believe a fine wine tastes better if drunk from a crystal glass. This is not entirely true – although drinking from a lead crystal glass is generally considered to be more enjoyable. It’s actually more about the aroma than the flavour, the majority of what we ‘taste’ when we drink wine is in fact a combination of its smell and the effect of the evaporated aromas in the mouth. Crystal wine glasses, due to their heightened lead content (for a glass to count as ‘Crystal’ in Europe it has to contain at least 24% lead) have a slightly rougher surface than glass, which helps to release the aroma better by causing friction as the wine moves inside the glass.

Aside from this, the differences are almost entirely aesthetic. A lead crystal glass is clearer and shows off the wine better, allowing serious wine tasters to examine its ‘legs’ more easily. It’s also quite a lot heavier than glass – again because of the high lead content – not to mention it’s more sparkly and makes that nice ringing sound when you tap it – science aside, crystal glasses are just generally more satisfying to drink from!

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This post was written by wine on April 29, 2009

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