Wine Cellar Cooling
 At Wild Grapes we strive to provide completely impartial and professional advice for clients looking to build their own wine cellar or wine room. Accordingly, we are of the school of thought that cool, ‘passive’ environments (such as traditional underground Victorian or Georgian cellars, etc) provide ideal locations in which to store wine without the need for artificially regulating the temperature.
Ensuring optimal conditions for wine storage (10-14°C and 50-80% humidity) often becomes a consideration if you do not have the luxury of a good passive environment. Indeed even some below-ground cellars still suffer from extremely wide fluctuations in temperatures, which are not ideal for long term wine storage.
It is worth bearing in mind that deterioration of wines intended for personal consumption is always disappointing; however where wines are being purchased as an investment and may eventually be resold, provenance (where and how they have been stored) becomes an imperative issue.
In the event that wine cellar refrigeration is the right option for your wine cellar, there are two main areas which you will need to consider:
i) A wine cellar cooling unit
ii) Wine room insulation
Don’t be lead astray!
There are very good arguments which state that wines which are kept in wine cellars where the temperature fluctuates slowly across a small range, suffer absolutely no ill effects. Indeed in most cases, wines which are stored in good passive environments develop structure and complexity which a static environment (at a constant 13°C) simply can not reproduce. Look no further than the wine cellars of the top domaines in Bordeaux or the Rhône (where summer temperatures are 3–4 ºC higher than they are in the middle of winter) to know that this is an age old belief founded in simple good common sense! |
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