How to create a luxury wine cellar in your home

Are you a wine connoisseur? A keen collector of fine vino? Maybe you have some rare bottles you have bought as a financial investment. If you have an area in your property to spare, why not make a feature of your collection and create a luxury wine cellar in your home. 

Type of Storage

There are three types of wine storage for your home - spiral cellars, rooms, and wine wardrobes or walls.

Spiral cellars are fitted into the ground below the property and are made from concrete. Wine rooms are just that - rooms in which to store wine. The rooms can be built from glass, wood, or metal. If you are short on space, you could install a wine wardrobe or wine wall, which can be made to measure and be hidden away or made into a conversation-inducing feature. 

Metrics

To protect your wine collection integrity, you need to consider humidity, temperature, ventilation, darkness, and the positioning of the bottles. 

Humidity should be between 50% and 80% to keep the corks moist and prevent mildew from growing on the bottle labels. A couple of plants placed in the area can help regulate humidity.

To preserve the flavor of wine, the wine storage environment is kept at a temperature of between 45 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit - as near to 55 degrees as possible. Air conditioning units can help keep the room at a constant temperature throughout the year. You may want to consider purchasing a large refrigerator for wines that need served chilled such as white or rose varieties. To make it look like it is part of your cellar and built into the walls like the other wines' storage, you could enhance it with a refrigerator trim kit. Basements are a popular location for wine storage units because they are underground and naturally cool.

As UV light can affect the lifespan of wine, you will need to make sure that any light fittings you use aren't Ultraviolet.

The Build

You can build your cellar if you are handy with some tools or have it professionally installed.

Whatever you decide, the cellar will need to be built with stud walls and lined with a vapor and insulation barrier, concrete floor, electricity supply, air conditioning system, and shelving. The cellar door needs to be an exterior grade door sealed on three sides with weather stripping and a fourth threshold. It needs to be like this because you keep the cellar at a different temperature and humidity to the adjoining area.

The bottle is the best storage horizontally as it helps keep the corks moist and means you can store more than you could if they were upright. You can exercise your creative streak when it comes to the wine racking - create a vintage look with bespoke oak racking or traditional crates. You may want to decorate your cellar with stylish floor tiles, paint, and install a table and comfortable chairs so you can sit in comfort while you sample your wares.