"Living with Wine"- The New Wine Cellar

“Living with wine”! My neighbor brought to my attention a neat article about wine cellars in a section of a local newspaper, Newsday LI Home. Wine cellars are no longer found underground or in basements. With modern technology and building supplies the wine cellar is now on the “main level” and has now become the “focal point” or “centerpiece” (or just incorporated in the “main” living area). If nothing else just looking at the gorgeous pictures and reading how some of he collectors or winelovers got interested in wine in the first place was just so pleasurable and pleasing.
Being an amateur home winemaker all I ask of my passive wine cellar basement is to be functional and consistent (with only a gradual swing in temperature). Not only does my basement house my wines on various types of homemade rustic-looking wine racks (enough to accommodate 1000 bottles) but its also houses several oak barrels, 25 five gallon carboys, 1 fifteen gallon demijohn, three Italian fermentation vats (capable of holding 500 lbs of crushed fruit each), 2 20 gallon and several smaller fermentation vats, and an assortment of various winemaking equipment and accessories.
Basically from the very beginning our “set-up” was geared to make gravity siphon racking from various holding vessel easy. Therefore the oak barrels are held on moveable “dollies” 24 (plus) inches off the ground to assist in gravity racking from barrels to carboys. There is enough “shelving” to accommodate 25 five-gallon carboys to “hold” them “high enough” and at “rest” to rack from “glass” to barrels.
My wine cellar looks nothing like any of the featured cellars in the article but it suits my needs just fine and I never get tired just hanging out down there. Two of the featured cellars in the Newsday article I believe was featured in the book “Living with Wine” by Samantha Nestor with Alice Feiring.

Salute

http://www.newsday.com/classifieds/real ... -1.3860318

while not a winemakeer, we too have a passive cellar and have been enjoying it for the past 24 years..While I have the capacity for > 1,000 bottles, I try to keep the contents below 600, knowing full well my somewhat compulsive buying tendencies

My cousin John Van from West Islip LI, has had a wonderful above ground wine cellar for many years. He does have a low key fridge unit for it, but it uses minimal energy. Don't know exactly what it holds, but my guess is close to 500 bottles, with a lot of emphasis on Burgundy.

If I had the $$, Victor, I'd probably hire a big shot architect to design my house around my wine cellar, too. But, lacking that, I am fine with my self-made, oak-paneled basement wine cellar. It's about 10 by 11 feet with wood and lucite shelving. Like yours, Carl, it is a passive cellar but with space for only 500 or so bottles. I store extra glasses there as well as wine literature, written reviews and notebooks. I also store some old bourbons in the cellar and a small oak barel aging some spirits. It is a joy to me and my family. One of my sons had a friend over recently and I was pleased that my son took his friend down to see the cellar. Having recently organized/inventoried everything, I am getting a lot more satisfaction out of the cellar.
I'll just keep dreaming and buying the occasional lottery ticket to get a cellar like one in the article, but I'm not counting on it.

Carl, it is a passive cellar but with space for only 500 or so bottles.

Like it wrote, it is not passive, but he has a low-key fridge unit to keep a fairly accurate temperature. His house in air conditioned, so it doesn' take too much to keep it cool in the summer.

My mother has an old beautifully maintained wooden credenza in her living room; it once held a RCA phonograph and two speakers and a fairly large record collection. Several years ago I “gutted” it out, added some shelving and today she mainly uses it as a cupboard for storage. Someday I may convert it into a wine storage credenza.

Salute

Our house was built in about 1927 by a physician who grew orchids - in Syracuse. He had a greenhouse that was heated by a furnace located in the basement of an attached toolshed. The basement also had a cistern. Greenhouse and furnace were long gone by the time we moved in and the whole basement was full of pipes that went nowhere and lots of junk. I cleaned it all up and made it into a wine cellar. What once was the cistern can now hold about 15 carboys and probably another 50 gallons of finished wine on shelves. My son-in-law knocked down a wall of the cistern to provide easy access and also installed a hoist for moving full carboys between the toolshed floor and basement. A couple of incandescent bulbs rigged to a thermostat provide heat so that I don't have to worry when the outside temperature gets very cold. Water pipes do run up from the house, but they are no longer functional. That's a real problem with all the cleaning involved in wine making, but I've learned to live with it and all the running back and forth to the house keeps me young.

I did this a few years ago: Wine Cabinet.
Dan - I have a a cistern that takes up about 20% of my basement and would like to cut a doorway into it and enclose it as a cellar. However, the walls are about 4.5 ft. high and the walls are 8 inch thick poured concrete. How did you cut into yours? Also, Dan, I've been in your tool shed. PEX water piping is great and easy to work with if you decide to replace the water lines.

Love the wine cabinet Howie. I'll ask my son-in-law when I see him this week how he cut through the wall. I remember he had a special saw and blade and that it was an awful job, took him hours to take down not much wall. He has mentioned putting in water too. God love him.

My new passive cellar is in the basement. Even in this hot summer it is holding steady at about 67 F. It holds 330 bottles. I have no intention of filling it. I think it will probably top out in the low 200s. It does have quite a bit of beer in it, though. My oldest son is a brewer at a craft brewery and he buys serious beers that can age. If you ask me, some are more like wine than beer. Like Supplication, a cherry beer made by Russian River that is aged for 1 year in used pinot noir barrels! I never intended for my wine cellar to age beer, but the best laid plans ...