Cellar in Phoenix

[hotwine]

WW, no, I haven't done anything yet to seriously address the problem - simply confining purchases to inexpensive wines (&lt;$20) and keeping inventory to &lt;300 bottles.<BR>Options so far include:<BR>- building a separate prefabbed wine house, using mail-ordered design and materials;<BR>- bringing old storm cellar up to specs<BR>- buying at least one large wine cabinet.<P>The wine cabinets would work fine, but she wants them relegated to the garage, and they wouldn't last long there, because of the summer heat. They seem to work best when the temperature differential is only about 20 degrees, and we'd be looking at twice that, which would burn 'em out pretty quickly.<P>Bringing the old storm cellar up to specs would require encapsulating it in insulation to isolate it from the bedrock in which it sits, which is coupling heat through the floor into the cellar from exposed surfaces.<BR>Cost estimate from our consultant is about $5k for that option - which would buy a new above-ground pre-fabbed wine house. So I'm leaning toward that last option. Cooler temps are arriving, so that's taking the heat off (!) the problem for now. <BR>We don't have a closet we could dedicate to wine storage.<BR>I think the real solution is going to be to move off and leave this damned heat (and drought) behind within the next year or two. Have already started looking by mail and the Internet in VA, TN, NC, WA, OR, GE, IT and FR.<BR>