Jun24 0
Posted by Roland McDonald in Home Decorating Ideas
Whether you are a wine collector or a wine connoisseur, having that perfect wine cellar is important. If you take your wine collection seriously, you must take your wine cellar seriously as well. So, how to create a wine cellar in your home?
Choosing the right location
Some wine connoisseurs insist that a wine cellar must be “underground” to truly qualify as a cellar. Years ago, this was a prerequisite for a wine cellar simply because temperature control, light control and humidity control are crucial for storing wines in their mint condition. However, these days it is possible to create a controlled environment (for temperature, light and humidity) anywhere in your home, so a basement isn’t necessarily the best location for your wine cellar.
Any area with minimal use can be converted to a wine cellar. A separate room, an old store room, attic and even cubby holes in rarely used rooms will work as long as you can create a cool, stable environment with maintained humidity, insulation and light levels.
However, according to experts, the best wine cellars are those that make use of under staircase space. Here, it’s easy to maintain the required temperature by using a thermometer that will record both the maximum and minimum temperature so that you can keep regulating it to keep it stable. Where under staircase space isn’t available, a cupboard installed in a cool, dry, dark place can work like the perfect wine cellar.
Maintaining the Temperature
Temperature stability is the most crucial aspect of your wine storage area. Put in some research to understand more about heat transfer via conduction, convection, radiation and evaporation. Make sure you choose a cool area for installing a wine cellar, where heat transfer works in your favor naturally. This can be done by installing the cellar along an outside wall and using proper insulation to ensure heat transmission within the cellar is minimized. You also need to prevent draught winds within the cellar to prevent heat loss via either convection or conduction. You can also make a cellar cooler by painting the outside walls a light color to curtail heat absorption, while painting the internal walls a dark color to reduce heat emission.
Maintaining the Humidity
Another concern for an efficient wine cellar, humidity control is easier to achieve. Ideally, the cellar should neither be too dry or too damp. Buying well renowned humidity control equipment is the easiest way to create a stable environment for storing wines. Assuming that you chose the location of the wine cellar with care and are also maintaining temperature effectively, controlling humidity keeping in mind the indoor and outdoor humidity levels is made easier with the right equipment.
Maintaining level of Light
For a good wine cellar, you need to create a cool, dark environment. Choose a space where there are no external windows near your cellar. If this is unavoidable, try to control the level of light penetrating through by either covering the windows to block out light completely, or using thick dark curtains to minimize the amount of light coming inside.
These are the basic steps on how to create a wine cellar in your home. Today, there are several commercially available wine cellars and wine chillers with in-built temperature, humidity and light control features. However, if you want a more authentic wine cellar that does justice to your collection of vintage wines, consider hiring commercial builders or buying professional tools to help you with the planning and execution of the project.
Tags: home improvement, wine cellar
