Moisture is a major issue in many cellars, as is condensation. Wine needs a certain level of humidity or moisture in the air, however, this kind of environment is perfect for promoting the growth of molds. Mold can be very dangerous to you and your family, and it can destroy all that hard work. Be sure when constructing you use a quality vapor barrier between your walls and your insulation to prevent the condensation from forming inside the sheet rock. Also, use a fiberglass coated sheetrock that is impervious to mold growth. It’s a common misconception that the green back sheetrock prevents mold. As a professional wine cellar installer and mold remediator, I’ve seen numerous occasions where they have used green back sheetrock only to discover that mold has eaten it all away a couple years down the line. Spend a little more on quality mold and moisture resistant materials, and you will save yourself plenty of headaches down the line.

Another factor often forgotten is the flooring in a cellar. While carpets and rugs are attractive… they also promote the growth of mold. Bare cement works, though it’s not attractive. We recommend installing some stone tiling or ceramic tiling to give the cellar a touch of class, and prevent any undue mold growth as well.

Finally, mold and moisture love wood. Your wine racks are often constructed of wood. Unfortunately many decide to cut corners here, and end up paying the price. Oak and Maple woods are good, but there are much better hardwoods you could use that would stand the test of time and humidity much better. Be aware though that woods with strong aromas like cedar will taint your wine over time, so avoid these at all costs. The best kinds of wine racks are made of marble, these are excellent insulators, resistant to vibration, and will not grow mold at all.

The lesson to take away from this is to build with quality. You want your wine cellar to last for years and years, so be sure you think long term when you are constructing it.

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Ventilation can be damaging to wines because it can upset the delicate temperature balance in the cellar. While gentle air currents in themselves are of little consequence, the danger arises when these currents vary the temperature in all or part of the cellar. In particular, artificial cooling units have a tendency to introduce cold air currents.

There needs to be a compromise here. On the one hand, moving air can be a necessity in maintaining a stable temperature throughout the cellar. In doing so, however, the air should not be of such a temperature, or moved so quickly, as to cause rapid fluctuations in bottle temperature. This naturally presupposes that the temperature can vary in different parts of the cellar, and this in itself should be avoided if possible. Where absolute perfection cannot be attained, it is sufficient to ensure that stiff breezes directed at the bottles are avoided, particularly if they have the potential to change the bottle temperature.

There will always be sceptics who challenge the significance of a good cellar. The evidence presented will be anecdotal and subjective. Invariably, a particular old bottle will be cited, having been stored under imperfect conditions, consumed at a ripe old age, and praised wholeheartedly. My response is simple: These critics may never know just how much better that bottle could have been.

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There’s a good number of electric wine cellars available on the market, but by far one of the best, stylish, and most affordable electric wine cellars money can buy is the Cuisinart 15 Bottle Dual Zone Electric Wine Cellar. It’s a pretty cool little gadget to add to any wine enthusiast home or apartment if you seriously crave the ability to age your wines. The Cuisinart wine cellar offers two different temperature zones, so you can keep your white wines chilled and your red wines at the proper storage temperature as well. It is silent and operates without any vibration that could disturb the wine. Basically it combines a perfect wine storage environment with a wine refrigerator so you can have the best of both worlds. It comes preprogrammed with the optimal presets, though you can change it all with touch screen controls.

While this electric cellar isn’t a long term storage solution for your wines, and it limits your storage to 15 bottles of wine, we think it is a great choice for a good number of budding wine enthusiasts out there who want to enjoy fine wines, but don’t have the room for a cellar of their own. For under $300, there’s simply no better option available.

Besides, there’s nothing better than saying: “Anybody want some wine? Let me check what’s in my wine cellar” when you cork a new bottle of wine for your dinner guests.

Cuisinart CWC-1500 15-Bottle Dual-Zone Electric Wine Cellar

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Newport Wine Cellar has been in the plans for several years while we explored the wine regions and cultures of the world, experimenting with food pairing, diverse varieties, and enjoying the community that sharing wine creates.

Our philosophy is simple: find unique wines that give us pleasure and share those wines with our customers. We hope to impart to you our passion, our knowledge, our enthusiasm, and we hope to do so without the attitude that sometimes accompanies wine shopping.

Our shop will feature high quality, small production, hand crafted, unique wines from all wine producing regions, but we need your willingness to try something new. Weekly wine tastings and regular seminars will offer the opportunity to introduce you to new wines and create a connection with our community.

And, while wines are our passion, we occasionally indulge in a hand crafted beer, so we have a selection of craft and micro brews from the US and abroad.

We look forward to meeting you in our new shop, and thank you in advance for your support,

David and Maria Glade

If you ever are passing through Newport Rhode Island, then be sure to stop by the Newport Wine Cellar and say hello and see what they have in the cellar! Look around in your own local area and see what the local wine shops are offering, you just might be surprised and even make some new friends!

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If you are able to satisfy the demands of the first four conditions for cellaring wines, you are doing very well indeed. The last two are of lower consequence, but are worth considering for the best results. The first of these is the avoidance of disruption to the wines, both in the form of movement of the bottles and of vibration.

Guigal is the most important producer in the famous Côte-Rôtie region of France’s Rhone Valley. Outgrowing its 300-year-old cellars in Ampuis, it recently embarked on an enormous construction project. The result is almost two hectares of cellar caverns, climate controlled to 13oC and 80% relative humidity. This proved to be something of an engineering nightmare, with the facility sandwiched between the mighty Rhone river and a train line on one side, and a main road on the other. The finished product not only supports the road, but also Guigal’s production facility, with a mass of some five tonnes per square metre!

Traffic rumbling across the top of the cellar is detrimental to the wine. Understanding this requires a little insight into the way in which wine develops. Put simply, the chemical processes in the wine produce larger and more complex molecules that eventually fall out of the solution as sediment. Under stable conditions, these are able to settle along the bottom of the bottle or barrel, allowing the wine to develop fully. Movement disrupts this process, stirring the sediment and mixing it throughout the wine.

The solution at Guigal was to construct an advanced anti-vibration system throughout the entire cellar structure. While most of us do not have the problem of trucks rumbling over our wine collection at home, vibration can still pose a threat. Mechanical cooling units are prime culprits.

Further to this problem, there are extreme phenomena such as ‘travel shock’, which the wine can experience after extended transportation. It may take weeks or even months to settle before it is again at its best. Closely related is ‘bottle shock’, where the wine takes some time to recover from the bottling process.

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The very best underground cellars are cold, incredibly stable, moist and dank, and of course, very dark. Wines are creatures of the night, emerging from their long hibernation for just one moment of glory. But that moment will be less than glorious if the wine has spent its hibernation continually on display.

It has been verified that exposure to light produces chemical reactions in wine that cause it to deteriorate. In particular, ultraviolet light has the greatest effect, and white wines and champagnes are the most vulnerable. Amber-coloured bottles provide very good protection, but regrettably these have long ago fallen out of fashion to their much less protective clear and green counterparts. Consequently, the best solution is to keep the cellar in complete darkness whenever it is unattended. Intermittent artificial light will have minimal effect, but daylight should be avoided.

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Fussy little creatures, these wines! Once we have achieved a stable temperature of 15oC, the next thing to look at is the relative humidity. In order to understand this we need to consider how the wine is sealed.

Wine bottles are traditionally closed with the humble old cork, and although we are now seeing a number of better alternatives, alas, corks will still be with us for a long time to come. Being a natural substance, corks are somewhat prone to deterioration. They will not remain effective for long unless they are looked after. The easiest way to kill a cork is to dry it out. It will then shrivel, lose its seal, and the wine may begin to leak out of the bottle.

The cork can easily be kept moist on the inside by laying the bottle on its side to maintain contact between the cork and the wine. Keeping the outside from drying out requires a little more attention, and is best achieved by maintaining adequate humidity. Relative humidity around 70–80% is considered ideal. If the humidity is consistently below 60%, the cork will dry out.

Humidity throughout the ancient cellars of the old-world wine regions is regularly in the 80–100% range. At Marc Bredif in the Loire Valley in France, the innermost room of the cellar maintains a dead stable temperature of 13oC and a humidity of 90%. Vintages all the way back to 1874 lie perfectly preserved to this day. Well, almost perfectly. (I told you these bottles were fussy!) Bredif has recently constructed a very sterile climate- controlled warehouse to protect its new wines from excess moisture. Humidity above about 85% can cause labels to peel, cartons to rot and bottles to develop mold.

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Guide to Home Wine Making

The first basic step to take when making wine at home is to figure out what kind of juice you want to make your wine out of. Wine can be made from grape juice and also other kinds of fruit juices. Even flowers and herbs can be used to make wine! So decide which direction you want to take your diy wine making. Get a hold of the juice you want, in the quantity that you want, and put it in the container you will be making the wine in.

Next you need to buy yourself a hydrometer. A hydrometer measures specific gravity. Specific gravity, when it pertains to wine, has to do with the weight of your juice mixture in relation to the weight of the water. You adjust the specific gravity by adding sugar to the mix. You want a ratio of 1.1 at least. Trial and error will help you determine small variances and the results.

Next you want to make sure all the unwanted bacteria is removed from your juice. Sulfites or campden tablets do the trick for you. Make sure you don’t use too much as it will alter the end taste of your wine. Usually about 4 crushed tablets in five gallons will take care of the bacteria. After adding the sulfites, mix the juice well, then cover with a towel and let the mixture sit for 24 hours.

Next you need to add the yeast to begin the fermentation process. When making wine at home, it is just fine to use regular grocery store yeast. This yeast will only yield a wine that is 10 or 11 percent alcohol. There are more specialized yeasts specifically for wine making that have a tolerance of around 15% so if possible, get a hold of some real wine makers yeast.

Now you wait. Wait 10 or so days for the fermentation process to take place in full. After the initial 10 days of fermentation, remove the wine from the container you were using and put it in a new clean and sterile container. Be sure not to transfer the sediment that may have formed with the wine. A siphon is the best way to do this job. You will want to seal this new container so that it is airtight. Let the wine sit for another month or so in order for the CO2 to escape.

After the wine has sat in the new container (you can get fancy and use an oak container if you’ve got one) the wine is ready to bottle. Be sure to sample it first to see if your first batch of DIY wine is bottle worthy. Who knows, maybe you will have created a masterpiece that is worth of aging in your wine cellar! Even if your homemade wine is not a masterpiece, you can be proud of your accomplishment and share it with family and friends. Keep learning, buy a guide, and one day you may be making wine that makes critics weep. (out of joy of course!)

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It is a common misconception that low temperature is the most important characteristic of a good cellar. It is not. It must take second place to a stable temperature. Nonethe- less, it is an important second place.

The chemical reactions that occur in a wine as it ages are incredibly complex, and in fact not fully understood. However, as with most chemical reactions, their rate is dependent upon the ambient (surround-ing) temperature. At high temperatures, say 25oC, these reactions will progress at such a rate as to develop the wine very quickly, effectively ‘cooking’ it. At low temperatures, below 10oC, the wine will develop very slowly indeed, virtually freezing into immobility. Somewhere between these extremes lies an ideal compromise, a temperature at which the wine ages slowly and elegantly, but still quickly enough that it does not need to be set aside for one’s grandchildren. This temperature is commonly accepted to be 15oC. In reality, any constant temperature between about 12oC and 17oC is satisfactory.

White wines tend to prefer a slightly lower temperature and sparkling wines even more so. In the ancient old chalk caverns under Champagne, temperatures are usually between 10oC and 14oC. As one descends to eighteen metres below the surface, the thermometer drops to 8oC. Here the greatest of all sparkling wines mature very slowly indeed.

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A constant temperature is the single most important prerequisite for cellaring wines long-term.

A wine bottle left out on a wine rack in the kitchen has to face some extreme changes in temperature. On an average day the wine might be stable at, say, 24C, but in summer, the room may heat up to 30C. At the same time, the wine in the bottle is likely to warm up to at least 27C. In doing so, the liquid naturally expands, possibly even pushing the cork out slightly or causing a small amount of wine to be expelled around the cork. (This will quickly evaporate but may leave a slight residue under the capsule.) This movement has also weakened the seal of the cork. When the temperature drops again, the wine cools, contracts and may consequently draw a small amount of air into the bottle around the cork. It is here that the biggest problem lies. This can occur even if the wine does not leak past the cork. (Leakage can easily be identified by stiff capsules that resist rotation.)

Throughout the bottling procedure, the winemaker works hard to very carefully limit any contact the wine has with oxygen. Excessive contact results in oxidation, a chemical reaction that causes the wine to age prematurely, ultimately making it flat and lifeless. Colour deteriorates, aroma and fruit flavour diminish quickly and the wine may become bitter. Such avoidance of oxidation is even more important during the cellaring process. If oxygen is allowed to pass into the bottle around the cork, the quality of the wine will slowly deteriorate.

More of a problem, however, is that of rapid temperature change. Seasonal variations aside, the daily temperature variation in our house is often in the order of 10oC. This results in a fluctuation of some 2–3oC in the temperature of wine in the bottle during an average day. Such conditions will cause a wine to deteriorate rapidly.

So what is ideal? The smaller the variation, the better. Although it is difficult to pinpoint exact numerical standards, I propose that excellent results would be achieved if one could maintain a daily bottle temperature variation of less than 0.5oC, a weekly variation of less than 1oC, and a yearly variation of not more than 5oC.

Wine can actually be stored at a much higher temperature without great consequences, but the temperature changes must MUST be slow. A great money saving tip on keeping the temperature steady that I found on another website is to:

Try sticking water bottles (the type that go on water coolers), full, into the room…fill up available space. The bottles come in crates that stack. Water acts well as a temperature swing modifier. In fact, most dense things like stones, bricks, etc. will work but water may be your best bet. Plus, in case you need the water, it’ll be there…though not sure how long you can store water in those plastic bottles before it “goes”. It’s hard to find water in glass carboys these days…in fact, you can buy carboys (not expensive) and fill them with tap water (with a touch of hydrogen peroxide or unscented chlorine bleach…just a touch…added before sealing).

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