Wine Cellar Design

[hotwine]

My cellar is an old bomb shelter about 60 yards behind the house. It's refrigerated and insulated now, but its location remains a nuisance. If I'm hauling a few cases to the cellar, I usually drive the truck as close as possible to it, then hump the individual cases along the foot-bridge leading to the cellar, set them down to open the steel outer door, and teeter-totter down the narrow (but short) stairs to the inner sanctum. If I were building a house into a hillside, I would put the cellar against an exterior wall and bring the driveway right up alongside the cellar's outside entrance; and have a 36 inch wide outer door for deliveries. Access from inside the house would be by a wide staircase from the butler's pantry.

Don't worry about finding a "wine-specific" cooling unit; I'm using an industrial split system of the type normally found in restaurant or supermarket walk-in coolers. A local refrigeration contractor can handle design and installation for you.

One gotcha to be aware of: most wine cellar cooling units can only handle a temperature differential of 20 degrees between the ambient room temperature and the target cellar temperature; any more than 20 degrees, and the cooler will work overtime and result in a very short lifespan for your compressor.

Good luck and please keep us posted on progress.