What You Need To Consider When Designing A Wine Cellar

If you’re collecting wines – some of which can go for $135,000 per bottle or even higher – you’re bound to feel proud of your collection. And why shouldn’t you? You worked hard to earn the money in the first place. But now you need a place to maintain all those high-end wines. How do you go about it? Well, you need to build a wine cellar, and what’s better than a wine cellar that you designed yourself?

First Things First

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 for your custom-designed wine cellar 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 basement wine cellars, which will in some ways restrict your ability to design your wine cellar, because its dimensions are already fixed.

Getting Started

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 I Design In My Wine Cellar?

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.

Other Options

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!

Enjoy, and as always, enjoy responsibly, Don Trosper