How To Incorporate A Wine Rack Into Your Kitchenset Design – If you love wine and are reading this, you probably understand proper wine storage and the benefits of building a wine cellar. For those less familiar with wine storage, the bottom line: Wine cellars provide the right conditions for short- and long-term wine storage, and offer the following benefits:
Wine is a complicated and somewhat delicate mixture. Excessive heat, wide temperature fluctuations and exposure to oxygen can quickly deteriorate wine. Ideal storage conditions help maintain the quality of a wine.
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Furthermore, most finer wines will change or ‘improve’ with age, and storing wines in ideal conditions provides the right environment in which this slow maturing process can take place.
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Finally, storing and serving wine at cellar temperature will help you serve better tasting wine. Wine is a complex mixture of organic compounds and alcohol, whose flavor profile is largely influenced by the temperature-dependent release of these aromatic compounds.
Wines served too warm (room temperature or higher) tend to express too much alcohol and aromatics, leading to a “flabby” and unfocused flavor. Wines served too cold (refrigerator temperatures) express too little alcohol and volatile aromatics and result in “tight” and subdued tasting wines.
Most wines are served too warm or too cold. Red wines served at room temperature are generally served too warm and white wines served at refrigerator temperatures are generally served too cold.
Both red and white wines tend to taste more balanced, and as the winemaker intended, when served at a cellar temperature of 50 – 60 ℉. Wines that are served cool warm as you drink them, allowing the flavor profile to develop as they are consumed.
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In addition to the right conditions, a wine cellar should be easy to use and located in reasonable proximity to the areas where you can open and enjoy your wine. A good wine cellar should also function at a reasonable price.
To obtain the above ideal wine cellar conditions, you can choose a location with favorable existing conditions (root cellar, unconditioned cellar, etc.) or actively create these conditions yourself by building a wine cellar.
Early wine storage often took place underground in wine caves, which naturally provided cool temperatures, high humidity, and darkness. Today, underground wine caves remain important for the storage and maturation of wine in wineries around the world.
Like the conditions in natural wine caves, the perfect wine cellar is cool, damp and dark. Consider a location for your new basement that will help you achieve and maintain these ideal conditions.
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Ideal locations to build a wine cellar are the conditioned areas in your home. Also consider ease of construction when choosing a site for your new cellar, look for a location with easy access to electricity, that is reasonably easy to seal and insulate and a place where you can install a wine cellar through the wall or through a duct can install. cooling unit.
Good locations to consider; an extra room in a basement, a spare basement cupboard, a cellar under the stair cupboard (the location I used) or a new construction in the basement or ground floor of your home.
Bad locations to possibly avoid: an unheated garage or shed, a sunny room, a room that is difficult to insulate and damp-proof.
A well-functioning wine cellar should mimic the conditions of natural wine caves: cool, moist, dark, vibration-free and stable.
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To consistently create wine cave-like conditions in your home, your wine cellar must be very well insulated, air and moisture tight, and built with moisture-stable materials.
The insulation and moisture barrier must extend completely around the basement structure: floor, walls, ceiling and door. The general layers from outside the basement to inside are:
The performance of a wine cellar is highly dependent on an air- and moisture-tight construction and sufficient thermal insulation of the floor, ceiling, walls and door. Wine cellar cooling units rely on airtight and well-insulated spaces and will generally not provide adequate cooling without these conditions. And operating a refrigeration unit without air barriers and insulation would be very wasteful, expensive and cause excessive temperature fluctuations.
Wine cellars must contain an air and moisture resistant barrier. The lack of an air/vapour barrier allows warmer air with higher humidity to enter the basement space, which can lead to moisture problems.
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Warm air can hold more water than cooler air. As warm air moves into a cooler area, such as a wine cellar, water vapor can condense and form liquid water once it reaches its dew point temperature. This water release can quickly lead to structural damage and decay and mold growth. The lack of an air/vapor barrier also causes excessive water production from your cooling unit.
When installing an air/vapour barrier, install it on the warm side of the walls, ceiling and floor of the wine cellar. This prevents warm ambient air from entering the cellar, cellar wall or ceiling cavities, where it can cool and water can be released. Placing the air barrier on the cool side of the basement allows ambient air to move toward the barrier, cool and release water behind the barrier. For this wine cellar, I first installed a poly air/vapor barrier and then added rigid foam insulation over it.
12 mil reinforced polyethylene sheet installed first as an air/vapour barrier, then rigid foam insulation over the poly.
Building a wine cellar without sufficient insulation is also a common problem. Without adequate insulation of the ceiling, walls and floor of the wine cellar, temperature changes will occur more frequently and mimic the temperature of the air surrounding the wine cellar.
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In poorly insulated wine cellars, the cooling units will spend much more time and cycle much more often, leading to higher electricity costs and faster temperature changes and greater temperature fluctuations.
Additionally, insufficient insulation makes it less likely that you will be able to achieve a reasonable target temperature (55 – 60℉) for your basement. Individual wine cellar cooling units typically have thermal performance data published for each unit for the size of the cellar, based on insulation, ambient and desired target temperatures. Below is an example of such a graph for the CellarPro 1800 series wine cellar cooling units (I used the CellarPro 1800 XT for my cellar).
Two considerations when choosing a material for your basement walls; 1) mounting shelves/racks and 2) mold/moisture resistance.
To store wine in your cellar, you will need some sort of wine rack. I used a commercially available metal rack secured with screws. Although you can use anchors and install these racks on drywall surfaces, it is easier and sturdier to drive screws directly into 1″ cedar planks. Cedar boards are naturally rot-resistant and durable in higher moisture environments.
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Drywall can be used for basement construction, but standard drywall may not perform well in high humidity environments and you may not want to use it for the interior finishing of your basement. You may consider using a smooth tile backer board (such as HardieBacker or Wonderboard) that contains little or no plaster or paper and is intended for use in wet environments.
The tile board can then be painted (smooth surface products) or finished with tiles. Tile is ideal for high moisture environments, but the downside is the added complexity and cost of installation and the difficulty of mounting rack or shelving fasteners.
Another option is to use rigid sheet foam (polyisocyanurate) to insulate your basement and as a finishing surface in the basement. I used this method for a previous wine cellar and it worked well because I had floor standing wine racks that did not require any fasteners to the walls. If you use this method, you can seal the seams between the panels with foil tape for a more finished look and extra air sealing.
Foil insulation with taped seams can also serve as a functional interior wall finish for your wine cellar
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After considering the options, I opted to use rigid foam insulation with foil plus 1 x 12 solid red cedar board as horizontal paneling to finish my basement walls and ceiling. Using solid cedar planks I was able to attach them to the wall studs and then screw them directly into them to mount my wine racks – flexible, simple, pleasing to the eye and slightly aromatic.
For the basement floor, choose a product that tolerates an environment with high humidity. Wood floors may or may not be a good choice due to the high humidity in a typical wine cellar.
If you do install wood floors, an engineered product (solid veneer bonded to a structural layer of plywood) may be a more stable choice. Tile will work, but again, it is more expensive and complicated to install, especially if you add insulation to the floor.
Vinyl products and continuous or tiled synthetic floors are probably good choices, but choose a product that does not have a strong odor. Some rubber floor mats have a strong odor that would be unpleasant in your wine cellar.
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I used foam gym tiles. These tiles are inexpensive, easy to install and readily available online or at local hardware stores. They also add extra insulation value and are not affected by water or provide food for possible mold growth.
There are many options for this