Once I decided to build a home wine cellar, the next issue is location: where do you build it? The best environment to store wine is a cool, dark place with minimum temperature fluctuations. In the old days that meant a cellar, underground, well below the frost line. If you have a room twenty feet underground, that’s dry and easily accessible, that should do nicely.
Unfortunately I didn’t have a room like that, and I had no desire to spend a huge amount of money excavating to build it, so the next best option is to find a suitable room in your house. Here’s what you want to look for:
- The coolest part of the house, which generally means the basement. Hot air rises, so obviously the basement is the coolest area in the house. Cool is important, since you want to store wine at something in the area of 14 degrees Celsius (57°F), so the closer your room is to that temperature, the better.
- The coolest area of the basement. Depending on where you live, you want to pick the area of the basement that is NOT on the side of your house that gets the hot afternoon sun, which warms the ground and the basement.
- A room free of vibration; you want your wine to remain still. It therefore is not wise to store wine directly beside your rumbling furnace or air conditioning unit.
- A room with no windows is essential. Light is then enemy when storing wine. Red wine ships in dark green glass to keep out ultraviolet light, so a dark room is essential. Bright light also creates heat, which is to be avoided.
For me, the solution was obvious. We converted an old closet at the far corner of our basement for the perfect wine storage area. The room is at the opposite end of the basement to where our furnace is, so vibrations are eliminated, and it’s at the coolest part of the house, and there are no windows.
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