If you’re going to store your precious wine collection in a wine cellar, you’ll need to control the temperature – but how?
You can control the temperature – and humidity – of a wine cellar using traditional air conditioning, refrigeration units, and humidifiers. There are countless specialized wine cellar cooling systems on the market, all designed to keep expensive wine collections at the optimum level.
Read on to learn more about wine cellars, how they must be maintained, and the alternatives available.
From Seller to Cellar
There are privately owned wine collections that are valued at several millions of dollars. For some, it’s a fine art and a lifetime pursuit to acquire as many expensive bottles of wine and champagne as possible.
For example, there’s the collection found at the site of the Hotel de Paris, which consists of some 350,000 bottles of wine and champagne. This is one of the grandest cellars in the world, and services several restaurants in the area.
In Tampa, Florida, there’s an iconic and legendary steakhouse known as Bern’s, which has one of the largest wine collections in the United States. In the cellars of this steakhouse are more than 750,000 bottles of wine.
Some of these bottles of wine are allegedly more than a century old.
The call for fine wine collections is as strong now as it ever was, with some collections warranting a staggeringly high value. In 2019, a record-breaking collection was sold at auction for almost thirty million dollars.
This private collection consisted of around 17,000 bottles of wine, and contained ‘first-class’ Bordeaux and Burgundy wines. There are many cases in which buying a bottle of wine or champagne could be seen as a considerable investment.
And ultimately, all these private collections must be stored in the optimum conditions, in a wine cellar or a wine room. This is where the proper maintenance, temperature, and humidity levels come into play.
Fine Wine, Fine Conditions
When it comes to storing wine for a long period of time – typically for aging – there’s a strict set of rules you must follow. If you don’t, your wine could prematurely age, spoil, or even burst from the bottle.
The first thing to consider, and arguably the most important, is the temperature of your wine cellar. Now, wine cellars are inherently cool, but in warmer climates you’ll need to work a little harder to maintain a consistent temperature.
It’s why cellars have been used to store wines for thousands of years, long before refrigeration units and air conditioning systems were a thing. The real goal to aim for is a cellar that is well ventilated, cool, humid, and of course, durable.
Ventilation is a very important aspect to take into account, and you can learn more about it in another article we published.
So, when you’re trying to keep your wine cellar cool, your best bet is to employ a smart air conditioning system. This will preferably be a system that runs on a thermostat, and regulates the temperature to the best of its ability.
Ideally, you’re looking to maintain an environment between 45°F and 65°F, with the mid-point being the sweet spot. If it’s much colder, the wine could freeze and explode from the bottle, and if it’s much warmer, the wine will spoil.
As we’ve mentioned, you’ll also need to keep a close eye on the humidity levels, but it’s not as overwhelmingly important as the temperature. It’s advised to keep the cellar’s humidity levels between fifty percent and eighty percent.
The reasoning behind this aspect is that drier air can cause corks to quite literally dry out, and potentially crumble. It’s one of the reasons bottles are traditionally stored horizontally, as the wine inside ‘moistens’ the cork stoppers.
Out Of The Cellar
If you don’t have, or don’t want, a wine cellar, there are alternatives available. In reality, you can take any room in your home and convert it into a wine storage area, so long as you follow the aforementioned rules.
Therefore, it’s almost too easy to construct a makeshift wine room in any space, from a closet to an entire spare room. If you’ve only got a few dozen bottles, you could even opt for a simple wine cabinet, or a specialized refrigerator.
The latter options start at just a few hundred dollars, as opposed to the tens of thousands of dollars required for the construction of a wine cellar. Ultimately, it’s up to you.