How to choose the right features for your custom wine cellar.
Regardless of whether you’re a homeowner or a business owner having a custom wine cellar installed, you want to insure you’re choosing the ideal wine cellar setup that best accommodates your needs.
With so many options to consider, review the following suggestions to learn more about how to choose the right features for your custom wine cellar.
01/17/2022
What’s your style?
Before going through all the features available for a wine room, let’s start with the big picture. What style of wine cellar are you looking for?
If your taste in décor is more in line with warm, rich woods and intricate details, you’ll likely desire a traditional style wine cellar. These traditional wine cellar designs typically include items such as brick, natural stone, tile, and wood floors, barreled ceilings, stone columns, & rolling ladders.
Does your taste lean more towards sleek, bright and contemporary? If so, consider a modern wine cellar design, which utilizes clean lines, frameless glass, stainless steel, and acrylic.
If you don’t feel your décor falls into either of those camps, your style is likely what is called “transitional”, which combines design features from both traditional and more contemporary wine room styles to your tastes.
Storage vs. showcase.
Many businesses and homeowners are going beyond looking at their wine cellar as a storage space.
They are looking to make their collection a showpiece, and want the wine room to showcase their collection and serve as a focal point for the room.
Look at the space you’re looking to have your wine cellar built in: Can it serve as a design element of the room, or do you simply desire the ability to store your wine?
Understanding this element of your wine room can help guide you towards what features you might like.
How substantial is your collection?
There are two issues to consider here. First, what kind of capacity are you looking for in your wine cellar? Wine cellars can feature storage to allow bottles to be stored upright, laying down, or at an angle, with choices for any of these options, but to choose the right feature, you need a good idea what kind of capacity you’re looking for in your cellar.
You’ll also want to consider wine bottle sizes so your storage can accommodate larger bottles. Typically, wine racks are meant to hold 750 ML bottles of wine. However, a Champagne bottle and Bordeaux bottle both hold the same 750 ML, but their shapes are quite different.
Almost all wine racks will hold standard Bordeaux and Burgundy sized wine bottles without a problem but may not fit your larger California red wines, the wide Rhone size bottles nor the Champagne bottle.
Also, think about how often you access your bottles. You may want to look at wine storage that is label forward so you can easily peruse your collection and find the bottle you want. This type of storage is more common in wall mounted wine racks.
Climate control.
Most likely, you’ll want to invest in some sort of climate control to keep your wines at the ideal level.
A professional wine cellar designer can provide the best advice as to which type of climate control you should use, as there are several types of wine cellar climate control to choose from, based on customer need and wine cellar design.
Choices include ducted systems, in the wall systems, split systems and humidifiers.
Keeping your collection secure.
If your wine collection is more substantial, you’ll want to invest in a system to keep your wine collection safe.
Security can be anything from a simple locked door to a more elaborate alarm system with keypad access and cameras.
If you plan on investing substantially in a wine collection, consider reviewing the wine cellar security options out there.
Don’t forget the finishing touches.
Wine cellars don’t just store wine anymore! Restaurants, country clubs and even homeowners are turning their wine rooms into a place to gather and entertain.
If this is part of your vision, look at seating, lighting, sound systems and other finishing touches to make the space more welcoming.
Perhaps you’d like to storage cigars in there as well; you’ll need to look at a humidifier so that nothing in the wine room is compromised.
Perhaps the room will also accommodate a full bar; you might consider storing glassware in additional to keep the entertaining space functional.
