The Auswine Forum

Evening everyone.

We're about to embark on a knock-down rebuild of our house and as part of it we're going to have a cellar. Hurrah! The house will be rated a touch over 9 stars so will not require much heating/cooling. The cellar, about 3.5m x 3.5m, will be off a TV room and mostly underground.

I'm thinking of putting in a small mechanical cooling unit which could click on if it the cellar needs it. It will be insulated from the TV room, including the slab, but I didn't want to take any risks with such a tight building envelope.

Any advice re what small cooling units I should be looking at? And any other cellar / house advice would also be most welcome.

Many thanks,

Travis

G'day Travis. Where are you located? The annual as well as diurnal fluctuations may influence your decision, even if most of the cellar is underground.

Also, what racking system do you have in mind? Avoid the Modularack timber ones in favour of the Bordex (or similar) if you want single bottle storage. The latter take up much less space, which means you can fit more bottles in .....

... which leads onto the next issue. How many bottles are you planning on storing? Are you allowing for growth? I have found that I accumulate more wine as I buy some wines every year and this becomes a habit - as well as discovering more wines. The collection that I vowed to stop buying at 1300 bottles has now grown to well over 3000 - so you might want to make the racking system in a 3.5 x 3.5M cellar as space-efficient as possible. I have over 2000 bottles in a 2.7 x 3.4M space with Bordex style racking, and around 1100 bottles in a 3x3M space with Modularack racking. All individual bottle storage apart from the cardboard boxes now invading the floor space in both cellars. Both are air-conditioned, by the way, and maintain 16-18 degrees and modest humidity.

Cheers
Allan

Hi Allan,

Thanks for your reply. Much appreciated.

We're in Canberra. Cold Winters and hot Summers.

I'm going to install the racking myself. It's going to be the good old metal reinforcing mesh sheets from Bunnings. My Dad and I have kitted out a few cellars over the years with this and it's been great.

It's more any advice that can be given on cellar cooling/conditioning systems that I'm keen on. It's not a big space that we're building, and it will be in an almost passive house, but I wouldn't mind having a small unit, installed during the build, as "insurance".

Are there brands people recommend, or don't recommend?

Many thanks again for any advice.

Cheers, Travis

Hi Travis, my only minor concern with the mesh sheets is that on occasion the bottle labels may get slightly damaged from the hard nature of the metal. Not an issue if all wines will be drunk by yourself but something to consider if you pride yourself with perfect labels.

I am modifying my cellar soon with laminated wooden shelving to accommodate screwcaps. More bang for your buck storagewise. My only fear with this is will l create too much weight for the four brass support pins on each of the cubed shelves. I probably could fit 6 by 8 bottles per cube which would weigh approx. 48 kilos. Thoughts anyone? I’d hate to lose that many bottles on a miscalculation.