Building a home wine cellar is the ideal way to store your wine collection in top condition. Your cellar must be built to store wine correctly as it ages, ensuring that the wine develops the complexity that winemaker intended.

Building a home wine cellar from the ground up – or more likely, from the basement up – may seem like an overwhelming task, but that proverbial first step is usually the most difficult. It usually starts with collecting the first bottle and eventually finding that your collection has grown to a point that you cannot store it at home without a cellar.

A well-insulated home wine cellar can cost many thousands of dollars to build but so can a large refrigerated wine cabinet so often a walk-in home wine cellar is the more economical and cost effective way of storing your wine.

Before you start building your home wine cellar consider the following.

Temperature must be a first consideration plus strictly limiting the amount of natural light. Your wine room must be well insulated – extruded polystyrene provides ideal insulation. Those living in a mild climate you may be able to create a passive cellar that requires no cooling system.

Wine cellars generall have thick walls. Two-by-six construction permits better insulation, allowing the cellar to remain at an even temperature. In an active (as opposed to passive) wine cellar, the temperature and humidity are maintained by a climate control system.

Temperature swings of more than a few degrees a day can destroy your 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 remain constant between 45 degrees and 60 degrees F, and always avoid exposure to direct sunlight. It is possible to build a wine closet or a wine cupboard at home that will have the required humidity level of between 50% and 80% that is ideal for all types of wines.

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.

Vibration is a major issue during the transportation and is the reason winemakers recommend allowing your wine to rest after travel. This is also important whenever you buy wine from a winery or even from your local wine outlet. Never take it home and pull the cork out without allowing it to rest. In fact, all your wines should be put immediately into 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 better-constructed and larger your cellar, the more the value of your house goes up as well.

A wine cellar generally requires a lower temperature than the surrounding living areas and therefore must be treated differently in relation to those areas. If your wine cellar requires cooling do not attempt to cool it by using a domestic air conditioning unit. Domestic air conditioning removes the humidity from the air and will quickly destroy your wine collection by drying out the corks. Several popular brands of wine cellar cooling units are available that will cool any sized wine cellar. Your wine cellar is a personal statement, and will become one of the most important areas in your home. This is the place where you can indulge your passion for fine wine and where you can display your precious acquisitions to friends and family. Click here to discover how to build a home wine cellar and, if you have the space, you could try incorporating a bar or a wine tasting area.