Constructing a Wine Cellar

I'm Tom Bain and this is Wine, Money & Song. If you're interested in wines and wanting to find out the best values, please subscribe. So this is part B of planning and the actual designing and construction of your wine cellar. Now as you know I've been I've had four different wine cellars but the last one and the one in California I really had to build from scratch and I had to actually have help with it especially the one in California because of the earthquakes there. We had to secure the walls so that if we had a rumbler I wouldn't lose all the cases crashing in on each other. My cellar in the Boston region I called two contractors to to go to the site and to plan out the plans and to lay everything out and both contractors didn't show up and I only had a few weeks before the wines were being delivered so I did it myself. I did it myself. I insulated the area with fiberglass batts. I sealed them in with rigid board fiberboard and the walls I did R30 and the ceiling around R45. If I had to do it over again because it was 15 years ago and spray foam wasn't where it is now. Everyone uses closed cell spray foam which I would recommend because it has a vapor barrier and it's much tougher and it's a great insulator and also makes your walls stronger but I didn't use it back then but as I said if I would do anything now I would definitely use closed cell and what you have to understand you're not going to own these wines for a few months. I've owned some of my wines for 40 years and you have to find a really stable environment and as I said before you really need the proper temperature very small range and a moist environment. Now right in front of me I have a map of soil temperatures in the United States and they're very different and the reason why they are very different the soils are different if you're in a sandy soil it'll be warmer than having clay and rocky soil but it's also the climate you're in. The further north you are the cooler it is obviously and you don't have to refrigerate or worry about the heat so much as you do as you go south and generally once you go south of the Mason Dixon line you know it's you might you might have to refrigerate but if you're five and five and a half feet below ground subterranean generally you're going to generally it's around 57 to 55 and the better you insulate the transfer of heat is very very narrow you don't get the transfer of heat back and forth so that's why it's so important to insulate and to be very tight and it narrows the heat coming in and the coolness going out and you want to keep it as small as range as you can and as you fill up your wine cellar the more cases you have the harder it is to move the temperature in the wine cellar now if you think about it why is that well your bottles absorb thermal mass it's cold and if your bottles are 55 degrees and let's say you have 500 cases it's very very hard to change those 500 cases quickly if you have 50 cases 10% of that the temperature change will be much more rapid it'll be thrown off but the more cases you have the better the insulation they they give you that thermal mass of not changing temperatures quickly whether up or down and and that's key and to keep a cellar packed is a good idea if you want that thermal mass effect and and I've learned that so we're gonna go to my wines my wine storage facility and I'm gonna give you some hints on how I laid out my cellar and how it may help you with yours in your wine storage facility very important that's where a lot of leaks come from temperature can seep in and seep out if you see this door it's a regular door but I have four inches of styrofoam board here which probably gives it a 35 R value 30 R value and when it shuts it seals the room you can feel it suck the air out and that's key how tight that is and you see how thick that is very important to have the opening of use of your of your storage facility very tight okay I'm gonna go down here and I'm going to talk about temperature gradient now it's about to the ceiling it might be seven seven and a half feet no about seven feet to the ceiling at the bottom here the bottom two cases are generally for three to four degrees cooler than the top cases from the ceiling that is a big difference and why is it different well there's no movement of air and as you know the properties of cold air is it sinks to the bottom and warm air rises to the top so how does that go into your thinking so you put the wines on the bottom that you want to be the coolest the wines you're going to keep a long time and as you see these are first growth Bordeaux's we got Chateau Petrus there we have Le Mission Aubry on we have all the Aubry on those are wines you keep a long period of time and you want them at the coolest temperatures and and also you want champagne near the bottom and Burgundy also and white wines you want to the cooler areas now what wines you're gonna store on top and it's three to four degrees difference which is a difference you know that's that's a difference if you're going to be how fastly they age and so the ones you keep up top or wines you're not going to age a long period of time generally or wines that you're going to drink in a few years or wines you're going to open up soon and it's key so remember there's no movement of air here the only movement is you going through and moving some cases once in a while I want to talk to you about the bins that you use now as you see my storage I have some fancy racks there and it's nice to show but what I have in my mind is I want to store the maximum amount of cases at the most ideal temperatures and humidity and I want to have access to them now these industrial steel fixtures if you notice only too high too high so if I want to get to Latour Aubry on 2005 all I have to do is move one case out and I can slide it out and each one of these fixtures it's about 33 to 35 cases all right and it's four feet wide and it's about six and a half feet up so I have one two three four five five of them so five times 35 so let's say it's a hundred and sixty cases on this wall all right but be careful now I said how it's easy now I have cases just piled up here because I didn't have room to put another four foot structure there because of the corner so if you notice I have one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven high now if I'm gonna get the lynch bars on the bottom I got to move ten cases those are 50 pounds each and at my age that's a lot of moving and that would break my back so the advantage of the shelves these shelves these industrial shelves is you can move the cases around much easier now you lose a few in storage but the ease of getting wines accessing the wine it's very important and as you see here I I have shells here too so you have to keep at least three feet 30 to 36 inches so when you slide it out you have room if you're too close you're gonna bang into the cases so you got to leave room to move the cases out and have elbow room to get them very very important and I want you to think very very carefully I know people want a beautiful looking cellar and to me that doesn't matter to me what matters to me the aesthetics don't matter I want functionality and I want the wines to be in the best environment to them to age and I don't need to show the wines off and I don't need to spend thousands of dollars on pretty-looking racks you know these racks do the job for me these industrial racks and I've been very happy and they're incredibly strong there they can hold thousands of pounds each show so I'm very very happy with that now looking at the ceiling you see the firm boards that are faced with aluminum foil and you see the cracks in between you see the fiberglass there and I have them screwed in and I have or 30 walls which have fiberglass on the inside and then I have foam board over it so it's around 30 now I wish I would have done a more I wish at the time I did the closed cell insulation but I did and the temperature here goes down to about 53 degrees in the winter and in the summer it may go to 60 maybe 61 for a week or two and that's acceptable to me is it super ideal no but I've had these wines a long time and anyone who's tasting wines out of my cellar know that my wines are stored impeccably and it's really worked for me but the key is very slow temperature change and keep it keep it within that 55 to 60 you're in good shape and if you have to refrigerate I know a lot of people do it just in case on case they have something goes on that you have a heat spell or something and if you're in certain parts of the country you have no choice but to refrigerate but what you worry about is what if you have a power blackout then you have to have a backup generator so it's a box of worms and being below subterranean we're about six feet under here we're about six feet and we're gonna go around and you know I have bins I have and the key thing is to be able to get to all these cases to get to them easy access and as I said the this is a bad thing where there's eleven cases on top of each other and if I want to get to the bottom it's gonna you know I'm gonna break my ass doing it and I'd rather not I'd rather just move one or two cases makes my life much easier much easier and I talked about thermal mass look at all these cases against each other how hard is it going to be to change the temperature this is I'm trying to think how many thousands of bottles are here it's probably close to 10,000 bottles 12,000 bottles and the thermal mass here everything is packed so tight there's very little air to warm or to chill so to change the temperature in the wine it takes a lot and that's a good thing that's that's a good so we roam around let me put a light on come around the bend now I have in this facility here I have windows which I filled in that are behind there there's a window there and there's a window there and it's about five and a half to six feet below ground but I super insulated it put board over it and what I did on the outside of this storage facility is I put bags of white marble chips around it to serve two purposes one is to reflect any sunlight not absorb it they're white and they reflect it and also as a vapor barrier I put plastic and then I put the chips on top of it and that keeps any moisture away and I've never had a problem it's almost 20 years I've had it in this facility and I've never had a drop of water and thank God thank God and I would recommend the people who do have cellars you should put you should put something underneath the bottom you should have some skids or something just in case you have a little water that you know the cases don't get wet but I've haven't had that problem and also what I have here is I have a very small ladder now for me to get these cases down here I have to now have I ever had an accident here where where cases come falling down yes I did and I had styrofoam magnums plugged in all the way to the top and I was moving cases from the other side and I pushed and they just went over like and I just heard crashing and it was probably six seven magnums broken my heart broke a little bit too but it was my fault and it's part of of course the doing business and as you see I can go up here and I can move the cases here and I'm reaching a point in my wine collecting career where it's getting harder and harder for me to move 12 bottle cases so what I'm doing is I'm trying to split them up into six bottle cases where it's much easier for me to move something I'm conceding to old age and you should be very careful some of some of your wines are very expensive and I'm trying to think I've maybe broken outside of that one incident where I knocked over all the magnums I maybe broken two bottles of wine one was a Provence Rosé and one was an inexpensive Bordeaux so I've been very lucky I I've been very lucky but as you see this is really tight and it's really well insulated I put metal tape on the seams and it's really worked out and how do you know when it works out you taste the wines and if the wines you know some of my wines are 30 35 years old they're in excellent I ideal condition and I have very good Provence I have very my cellar is known for great Provence and I think I think I covered most things and as I said I have champagne below here I have some Cristal I have some Rollinger some Provence Rosé some Cattinger very very cool area and this is how I constructed my wine storage facility and it's given me great enjoyment great satisfaction and pride of ownership but it's kept my wine safe and it's kept them in a great environment and it's something you should really make the investment if you're really serious about collecting wine and storing wines be earnest in how you store your wines