Helpful Residential Wine Cellar Design Tips
To keep your wine collection at the peak of flavor and quality it needs to be stored in a climate-controlled environment. If it is not stored correctly, then the wine will be ruined and your investment will go to waste.
The best place to store your wine collection is in a custom wine cellar located somewhere inside of your home. However, designing a wine cellar has a few challenges and requires many decisions to be made.
To this end, here are some helpful wine cellar design tips:
Tip: Choose a Vibration-Free Location for the Wine Cellar
Before you can design the perfect wine cellar for your collection, first you need to decide where to install it in your house. For example, will you build the wine room next to the kitchen, or will you put it in the basement?
Since vibration has been proven to transfer energy into a wine's chemical-aging process and spoil its aroma and flavor, planning to put the wine cellar in your basement or a location with a concrete slab floor is ideal. Alternatively, putting the cellar in a room with wood floors that move when you walk on them or on an upstairs floor should be avoided.
Tip: Use 2-Layer Glass Manufactured with Enhanced UV Light Protection
In addition to vibration-degrading wine, ultraviolet light can also spoil it.
As sunlight shines through windows and its UV rays hit a bottle, they pass through the glass and react with phenolic compounds inside of the wine.
This is a serious problem with light-bodied wines such as pinot grigio and riesling. UV light degradation of light-body wines is actually the reason they are always sold in colored bottles. Clear bottles let through more harmful UV light than colored bottles do.
To avoid UV light damage to your wine collection, you should design your cellar to utilize 2-layer glass specifically manufactured to disallow UV light to travel through it.
Tip: Design Your Wine Cellar for Maximum Storage Capacity Over Time
Finally, whether you have a small wine collection or one that is extensive, it is important your custom wine cellar design allows for maximum storage capacity today and in the future.
The best way to make sure your new wine room can store your current collection as well as bottles you add in the future, design it to use configurable wine racks. Since the rack system isn't confined to one set configuration, you can move things around as your wine storage needs change.