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Building a wine cellar at home is the perfect way to store a wine collection. A cellar should be designed to correctly store wine as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops complexity and depth and does not spoil.

Building a wine cellar at home from scratch may sound like a daunting process, but the first step that proverbially applies to climbing mountains applies also to wine cellars. It all begins with collecting the first bottle and eventually finding that your collection has grown so large that you can no longer store it.

The cost of a well-constructed wine cellar can run to many thousands of dollars but so can a large capacity refrigerated wine cabinet, so you may find that a custom-built home wine cellar can be the most economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.

Consider the following before you start building your wine cellar.

Cellar temperature should be a chief consideration and also the amount of natural light. Ensure the room is well insulated – extruded polystyrene insulation is ideal. Those living in a mild climate you may be able to create a passive cellar that requires no cooling system.

Wine cellars generall have thicker walls. Two-by-six construction provides space for quality insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at a constant temperature. In an active wine cellar, major factors such as temperature and humidity are maintained by a cooling system.

Temperature swings will quickly destroy your precious wine collection. Small temperature fluctuations from summer to winter will not damage the wine but those same fluctuations on a daily or weekly basis will cause your wine to age prematurely. Temperature should be maintained between 45 and 60 degrees F, and avoid direct sunlight. Thus, you can often successfully create a wine cellar in a closet and a humidity level between 50% and 80% is ideal for all types of wine.

Your must avoid vibration when storing wine; it agitates the bottle and speeds up the chemical reactions taking place inside the bottle – and not in a good way.

The transportation of wine can become a major vibration issue and is the reason most shippers recommend allowing your wine to rest after extended travel. This is important, also, when you buy wine from a winery or even from your local wine outlet. Never take the wine home and plan on drinking it without allowing it to rest. In fact, all wine should be immediately placed in your cellar.

Note that it is not just your wine which is valuable; the cellar itself will improve the value of your home. So the larger and better-constructed your cellar, the more the value of your house will increase.

Unless you live in a very cold climate a wine cellar is generally a lower temperature environment compared with its surrounding living spaces and therefore must be treated differently in relation to those spaces. Do not attempt to cool a wine cellar by installing a domestic air conditioning unit if your wine cellar requires cooling. Domestic air conditioning removes the humidity from the air and will quickly destroy your wine collection by drying out the corks. There are several brands of wine cellar cooling units available that will cool any size wine cellar. Your wine cellar is a personal statement, and will become one of the most important areas in your home. It is the space for you to indulge your passion for wine collecting and where you will display your latest acquisitions. Discover how to build your own home wine cellar and, if you have the space, why not consider incorporating a bar and tasting area.