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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Posted under Wine
This post was written by wine on April 29, 2009
