By: Perry Sims
Building a custom wine room requires an overall understanding of design and construction terms, techniques, options, and materials, and how these elements work together to create an ideal wine storage environmfent. Your wine room will be a permanent structure; while you may be able to adjust or remodel the racking systems to accommodate a growing collection, think of the room and its systems as permanent parts of your home.
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| Proposals made by a wine cellar contractor should include examples of prior work and references from former clients, detailed plans for the project, and a budget for materials and labor. |
Therefore, look for a location that balances capacity and convenience, employs an unused space (or one for which its previous use can be easily relocated or sacrificed), and provides reasonable access for extension of circuits and plumbing to new mechanical systems. Ideally, the cellar should use existing structural components of the house for some or all of the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.
If you're considering a below-grade location, for instance, choose an accessible corner where you can use the existing basement walls for two of the cellar's walls-you'll cut the expense of building them from scratch. Another good location is an interior space wholly within the home's exterior walls. Interior spaces have nearly constant, comfortable temperatures higher than those of the planned wine storage area, and they are isolated from the temperature swings typical of exterior walls. Be practical; if you choose a closet or understairs location, find somewhere else to store coats, boots, holiday decorations, and board games.
The project's budget is another critical consideration. Your resources for the project drive the design process, so settle them first. This assures that you will gain reasonable estimate for the cost of the project.
While locations such as basements are suited for so-called passive cooling, in which the surroundings regulate the climate without the aid of mechanical systems, they are generally unreliable for supplying the consistent climate control needed for a wine cellar environment. More often, plan to install active refrigeration and humidity-control systems, regardless of your wine room's location. They will create and maintain ideal conditions for proper storage and aging of wine.
Several key factors determine which is the right refrigeration system for your cellar, including room volume, location, and the construction of the walls, floor, and ceiling.
Cooling systems are designed and sized according to the volume of the area they cool, the desired temperature conditions for the space, and the combined structure and features of the finished space, such as its insulation, moisture protection, and seals and weather-stripping components.
Proper insulation slows the natural warming and cooling of the wine cellar. Consult a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (hvac) contractor or engineering professional who can calculate how well the insulated walls, door, and windows-if any-will slow temperature changes in the cellar and make specific insulation recommendations.
Typical wine cellars have interior walls and floors insulated to at least R-13 and its exterior walls and ceilings to R-19-or to R-30 if a wall is exposed to strong winds or direct sunlight or the ceiling divides the cellar from nonconditioned space. The quality of the room's insulation determines the demand or load on the cooling system necessary to maintain the cellar's climate, which in turn dictates the capacity and specific model chosen for the refrigeration system. The better the insulation and seals, the smaller and more energy-efficient is the cooling equipment required. A bit less accurate gauge is to size your cooling equipment using the cubic footage of the space or the number of bottles of wine the room holds.
From the book The Home Wine Cellarby Perry Sims et al. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by arrangement with Running Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group,www.perseusbooks.com. All rights reserved.