Urgent advice/help/suggestions needed!!!

[dananne]

Our 220 bottle wine cellar is dying -- it's having trouble maintaining temp under 60, is running almost all the time, and yesterday I discovered it at 82, after it had gone into alarm mode and shut down when it couldn't get the temp down to within 10* of the set temp. Thankfully, I caught it pretty quickly, and though the bottles were not yet warm to the touch, as the liquid temp didn't rise as quickly as the air inside the unit, they weren't likely in the 60s anymore, either. I did manage to get it down to the upper 50s again in the evening, and it's been hovering around there since, with spikes in air temp to the mid 60s. That having been said, we need to move fast and get a long-term solution, especially as we're already at max capacity and will likely be bringing a lot of wine home from the August trip to Oregon/Washington.<P>We do not have a basement, nor do we have an insulated house with little temp fluctuation -- we have a drafty, uninsulated, no sub floor, hot-in-the-summer-and-cold-in-winter, old Victorian home. So, finding a cool closet, basement, or some such is out of the question. <BR> <BR>We've decided to go one of two ways, and are gathering info to move one way or the other next week. <P>One option is to build a root cellar in the backyard to store wine. Does anyone use external underground storage? Good idea? Bad? What do we need to know (for instance, how deep to go, how much earth on top, temp/humidity control and fluctuation, etc.)? <P>The other option is to buy a temp-controlled credenza-style wine cellar that holds 300 or more bottles. <P>All thoughts or helpful advice are welcome. Thanks in advance.