Preparing Your Wine Cellar
Collecting and storing vintage wine is a pleasure that is enjoyed by hobbyists, enthusiasts and experts all over the world. Selecting and collecting your wine is a matter of personal taste and preference, and many people find themselves very passionate about building an impressive collection.
You may wish to display or keep handy some of your best wines for when guests come over, but making an investment in some good wine racks for the cellar is important for properly storing your wine and keeping it cool and dry. When you become serious about wine collecting, a properly built wine cellar is a great way to make the most of your finds.
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Converting Your Space into a Wine Cellar
Any dry cellar or storage space can be easily converted into a wine cellar with good, solid oak wine racks that make grabbing and properly supporting those vintage bottles easy.
Much like a cubby hole system, most wooden wine racks can hold between ten and one hundred eighty bottles and are built up in such a way as to make the labels visible to you, the connoisseur, while making it easy for you to grab the bottles from the top by their necks. They look like open bookcases and are built with sturdy support connectors. Not quite like shelves, but almost.
If your collection is growing by leaps and bounds, you will almost certainly need additional capacity. Depending on how much wine you expect to keep adding to your collection, you may need to think ahead about what kind of space you’ll need. This will help you to determine what kind of racks to buy, how high, how many rows, how many feet across, and so forth.
Here are a few tips to help you with deciding on what kind of racks to buy.
- Flexibility is key. You will want a system that allows you to store fat bottles and skinny bottles, so make sure there is room for a larger diameter than a regular bottle of wine, for those specialty bottles you come across from time to time.
- Carefully measure the floor space, the wall space, and the total square footage of the room that is going to serve as your wine cellar. It is important to remember that it’s better to have too much extra space than not enough space.
- Some other tips to keep your wine is to keep the temperature the same all year long. This is true of all alcoholic beverages when they are aging, but especially wine.
- Try not to jostle the bottles because this creates aeration inside the bottles which affects the taste and quality of the wine. It also stirs up sediments which are supposed to settle at the bottom of the bottle.
- This one’s a no brainer, but keep the wine bottles on their side rather than upright. Most storage racks will cause you to store your bottles this way by default, but it is important to keep the yeast and other nutrients from settling at the back of the bottle because when you go to pour it, you will want to be able to spot the deposits easily at the side of the bottle where the sediment has come to rest. Also, if you store the bottles upright, the corks will dry out, and the airtight seal made by the corks will be broken, causing the wine to spoil.
- You will want the room you store your wine in to be fairly humid. Most wine racks, when you buy them piece-by-piece as you add to your collection, will cost, on average, between one hundred fifty to three hundred dollars if you buy good, solid oak.
- Properly storing your wine is essential to helping it age well and important to keeping the bottles from breaking by accident. It is a way to protect your investment. To age well, your wine needs to be in the dark, and it needs to stay there. Ultra violet light tends to hinder the conditioning process that brings out the flavors of your favorite bottles of wine, so choose a room with no light if possible.
- Set up your racks in an orderly fashion and in a way that makes sense to you, the owner, so that your favorite wines will be easily accessible.
Choosing the Right Wine Racks
The number of racks you need will depend on your collection and the size of your wine cellar. Remember that you can always buy more racks later on as the need for them increases.
- If you want to take a look at some really good wine racks, check out the online store at winerackshop.com. The best part about buying from them is that they offer free shipping on all orders, no matter how small or how large. They offer a great value and a great selection.
- Another good place to shop is www.wineracksamerica.com. They, too, have a wonderful selection of solid wood wine racks in a variety of sizes, styles, and designs.
The style that you choose for your wine racks is entirely up to you. With the wide selections now available, matching your budget and satisfying your desires for cellar wine racks is very easy to do.
- A touch of elegance is usually desired in a wine cellar, as most connoisseurs consider their wine collection as their pride and joy. Nevertheless, try to stay within your budget, as you want to be sure you still have plenty of money leftover to buy more wine!
- To be sure you get the best quality, make sure your wine racks are solid wood and not pressed wood, as pressed wood tends to cave and dampen easily over time, and the pressure of the weight of the wine bottles may cause breakage, causing a good many bottles of wine to possibly go to waste in the process.
A storage system that complements your collection and makes it visible to visitors for easy label reading while also allowing you to store the bottles correctly will be the best choice for most people’s wine cellars. It is well worth the investment to buy enough wine racks so that you will have ample room to properly store your collection of wine.