building a wine cellar

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building a wine cellar
Posted by corkdork kel, Mar 15.

how would you go about turning one side of a room into a walk-in wine cellar entirely visible through glass? any ideas or pictures/blueprints recommended? Reply by RBoulanger, read more...Mar 16.

What kind of room is this? Is it in an apartment or a house? How much space do you have to devote to this walk-in cellar.

Making it visible through glass might look cool and impress your visitors, but remember that light can harm your bottles. You'd probably want to use polarized or tinted glass. Moreover, because you are going to be cooling the wine cellar, you might get all sorts of condensation on the glass.

As you can tell, I don't like the glass idea. You'll want to insulate the room from the rest of the house and then put shelving and racking on three sides. A lot of the shelving is available for purchase online or by catalog, but it adds up really fast. Reply by dmcker, Mar 24.

When considering what room to convert, you need to be very concerned about light (especially sunlight) as RB mentioned, but also vibration from foot or street traffic and any nearby household machinery, as well as areas of wide temperature fluctuation (surveys have found that temperatures in high-rise apartment rooms with large glass exposures can rise above 45 degrees C in the summer when the tenant is away). Even with refrigeration in your wine room that fluctuation can induce stress on the cooling unit, and in some instances icing. Finally, research carefully the cooling system you plan to use. Perche systems have a dodgy reputation, both in small fridge-like units and large storage warehouses. Forster, from Switzerland, makes excellent compressor systems.

Now you can see why underground cellars are still the ideal! ;-)

Reply by oceank8, Mar 25.

We tried for awhile to come up with a way to install our own cellar and realized it was going to be harder than we thought (and we are pretty handy). So then we got professionals involved and realized it was even harder. After much time and consideration, we bought a refrigerated unit that looks like a piece of furniture with a glass front and holds almost 700 bottles. It ended up being cheaper, we can take it with us if we move, and since we didn't change our house, we don't have to worry about resale. Part of me still wishes I had a walk in, but I know my choice ended up being more realistic for us. I wish you luck and would love to hear and see what you end up with!

Reply by Degrandcru, yesterday at 12:23pm.

@Ocean: Depends a lot of the room you have available to build you cellar. I have a storage room that have air circulation and a very steady cool year round temperature. Humidity in Mexico City is not a problem and the room is dark as I just enter to get wine or access what else I store there. So in this case the only thing you need is any shelving. A friend of mine just had a little room build in his shady patio. He had it built with very thick stone walls and a thick wooden door. So again, all he needed was shelving.

Reply by Gregory Dal Piaz, yesterday at 12:55pm.

I recommend this book to anyone and everyone who is thinking of building a dedicated cellar room.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Build-Wine-Cellar-Fourth/dp/1891267000

It's worth the tariff even though it is aimed at the do it yourselfer in many ways. If you do go ahead this gives you the information you need to know to have the job done correctly.    (hide)

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