How To Build A Wine Closet

People who are passionate about wine usually start to collect it and as the wine collection grows you begin looking for a place to store your wine collection.

A cupboard or closet can easily be turned into a mini wine cellar to store your growing wine collection.

However, before you start building your mini wine closet consider the position of the closet in relation to the rest of the house.

Try not to convert a closet against an outside wall into your new wine cellar. From season to season the other walls of your home may be subject to wide temperature fluctuations. If at all possible, choose an internal closet where the temperature is likely to remain more constant.

The degree and the speed of any change in temperature are critical elements in successfully storing and aging wine. A gradual change of a few degrees between summer and winter won’t matter. A similar change each day will harm your wines by ageing them too rapidly.

The number one rule when you are storing wine is to avoid large temperature fluctuations. You’ll notice damage of this type immediately from the stickiness that will often form around the capsule. Over time, the continued expansion then contraction of the wine will damage the integrity of the cork. It’s just like having the cork pulled and replaced every day. When this happens, minute quantities of wine may be pushed out along the edge of the cork (between the cork and the bottle neck) allowing air to seep back in. Once air has come in contact with the wine the irreversible process of oxidation starts and your wine will be ruined.

At 55º to 58ºF the wine will age gracefully, enabling it to fully develop as the winemaker intended. Higher temperatures will age wine more rapidly and cooler temperatures will slow down the ageing process. The damage done to your wine will be irreversible if it is stored at temperatures over 82ºF even for a month.

Perhaps the most difficult part of building a mini wine cellar closet is finding other locations to store what is already in the closet!! Don’t hesitate … remove all the present contents (move them elsewhere / give away / auction them) and start out with an empty closet!

Adequate wine racks may be purchased quite inexpensively from hardware stores, online retailers or storage specialty shops and you’ll have a simple but very effective mini wine cellar.

Wine rack designs vary in bottle density; price variations have more to do with aesthetics than efficiency.

Individual racks makes it easy to select bottles. If you place racks against only one wall of the closet there may still be floor or shelf space available for wines that you purchase by the case.