Port wine cellar

[Roy Hersh]

Has anybody built one in the past year or two?

If so, what are the things you learned from undertaking this project?

In the design process, what you would suggest that others avoid doing?

[Eric Menchen]

1. Don't buy your racks from Vinotemp. I contracted with them to make a custom rack for half bottles in January. In April they shipped the wrong thing. Now it is July and I'm still waiting.
2. Consider framing in the insulated floor. My floor is insulated with hard foam board (pink), topped with a layer of polyisocyanate, with a layer of cork floating floor on top of that. The contractor thought the insulation would be rigid enough so no framing was needed. For people walking on it, that's true. I'm not so sure about where my full wine racks are. I think the insulation has compressed somewhat. If I were to do it again, I would frame the floor and fill in with insulation in between.
3. Consider a vented cooling unit. For cost reasons my chilling unit vents into the basement. This means it is putting out warmer air to the basement which for 6 months of the year is beneficial, for about 3 is neutral, and for about 3 requires the A/C to counteract it in the afternoons. But that's not the real reason for this suggestion. I'd think a unit that vents directly to the outdoors would be quieter. You can certainly hear the chiller when it is running, and it is fairly loud in the room it vents to. Of course, my chilling unit was purchased used and is older. New models might be quieter.
4. Spray foam insulation would be nicer. I didn't have the budget for it. Spray foam serves as a vapor barrier all on its own and makes life easier in that regard.

[Andy Velebil]

Vinotemp is a horrible company. Search here and on Winebersekers and you'll see what I mean.


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[Moses Botbol]

I've seen some on this forum frame their wine racks with 3/4" square plywood slats. Works great to cover corner to corner. Make sizes for both 750 and 1500 ml. Have an area to stack OWC's, upright bottles, and large formats.

Have to consider the number of bottles and budget. Do you want beauty or bang for buck?

[Eric Menchen]

Do you want beauty or bang for buck?

I purchased my racking and cooling unit for $600, so that less than $1 bottle.

Here's all the racking, and the chiller, in my garage. The racking was sized to fit in the previous home (owner was moving), so I had to spend a bit of time cutting metal and reassembling.


I really need Marijke to take some pictures with a wide angle lens. In the mean time, these will have to do. I made the racking fit exactly.


And here is a shot with the racks pretty full, after I installed some shelves in the beer section.

[Eric Menchen]

Hopefully this link will work. Marijke took this photo. Here I am making the racks fit:


And the result:


I also put in some shelves for OWCs. This maximizes the space because nothing is lost in the corner. On the flip side, I have to move some OWCs to get to others, but I don't plan to move a lot of those for a long time.

[Roy Hersh]

Nice photos, Eric!

I built my cellar in early 2001 several months after moving in. I would not buy a home without a perfect space to put the cellar. I had "read the book" on do's and don't's ahead of time by Richard Gold, and it was helpful. I have case storage on top on my racking which works fine for me. But instead of 2000 bottles, I wish I had built it for 2500-3000 bottles so no cases would have to sit on the floor. They say that when you plan your cellar, always double the size. I though I had done that, but apparently was mistaken.

13 years later and I've only had to replace the chiller once, thank god. Beyond that i am really happy with the layout although wish I had more room for an actual table instead of just a countertop. That would be the only thing I'd change.

[Eric Ifune]

My cooler is 13 years old. It's still working OK, but I'm very worried about it here in Las Vegas. I may just get a new one (or even two with one being a back up) this winter.

[Michael T]

Do you guys mind mentioning what kind of chiller you have? I have a basement cellar that is cooled by the house hvac unit but it is not keeping it as cool as I would like.

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[Eric Menchen]

I think my chiller is a KoolSpace. For potential replacement I've looked at CellarPro, largely because they make units now that can be used, unmodified, for beer at serving temps (~45°F), but there are 4 or 5 different companies that make chilling units.

[Michael T]

I have been looking at the Mitsubishi ductless split system but not sure it will do the job, anyone have experience with it.

[Bradley Bogdan]

How much more complicated was your cellar due to your beer needs, Eric? Was it pretty simple to work all that stuff in or did it require a lot more effort?


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[Roy Hersh]

I have thoroughly enjoyed the Whisperkool 4200. It is done a very solid job and I am very happy with it overall.

[Eric Menchen]

How much more complicated was your cellar due to your beer needs, Eric? Was it pretty simple to work all that stuff in or did it require a lot more effort?

Skip to the last paragraph for an alternative solution.

It required a lot more effort, but that is largely due to the fact I was on a budget (call me cheap), limited to using the chilling unit I had. The controller on my chilling unit does not want to go below 50F. It will put out air at 40F, but the lowest you can set the temperature to is 50. And the manufacturer will tell you it is only designed to chill to 50. But the unit is also designed to chill a cellar twice as big, 600 cubic feet vs. ~300; and my beer space is only about 20% of that total. And the chilling unit is designd to chill to 30 degrees below the ambient temperature, and the highest ambient temperature my basement gets to is 65 or so. So the chiller should have the capacity, just not the control.

I removed the controller from the chilling unit to see how it was wired. I could have directly replaced it, functionally but not physically, with a controller of my own making. But the wiring would have been more complicated than I wanted, and it wouldn't solve the problem of controlling the temperature of the wine side of the cooler. I ended up making my own controller with a small computer board. It has multiple temperature sensors, a humidity sensor, and output controls. Three temperature sensors were used in my initial implementation. One sensor measures the temperature of the beer side (oh, there's some white wine there too), another the temperature of the wine side, and a third measures the temperature of a thermal mass jar. That jar is the key to making the cooler chill below 50. It contains a temp sensor from my controller, a small 15W cartridge heater, and the original temp sensor of the chilling unit. When I want the chilling unit to turn on, I actually turn on the small heater, which makes the chilling unit think it is above 50, so it in turn activates and starts chilling. I need a temp sensor there so I don't run the heater too much--just as long as needed.

The controller also controls a fan between the beer and wine sections. If the wine section isn't cold enough, it can turn on the fan. It turns out this really isn't needed. When the beer section settles at 45F, the wine section settles at about 52F. The clear vinyl curtain between the two sections isn't a great insulator and leaks enough air for that to happen. I might actually add a removable insulating panel in the curtain door frame so the wine can be held at 55. But that is a lower priority item. 52 is fine, and it is stable.

My cooler controller is documented here: http://www.theelectricbrewery.com/forum ... hp?t=26673

I came up with a complicated solution with a custom controller (~$100 and a fair bit of time) and my existing chiller (say $300). If you wanted to do a two-zone chilled room from scratch, you could just go out today and buy a CellarPro 1800XTS-B or 4200VSi-B unit which is designed to go down to 45F for beer. For my combined cellar size, I would go with the latter unit, which runs $2,795. Another alternative is to get a through-wall room air-conditioner and a CoolBot. Then just figure out the appropriate insulation between the two zones to keep the wine at the temperature you want, or put in a fan like I did with an off-the-shelf controller (Johnson or STC-1000 based).

[Eric Menchen]

In August the rack for 375s (and some 500s) finally arrived. I put it together in late August and installed and stocked it this past weekend. That's the good news. The bad news is I was lax with inventory record keeping when the bottles were just in boxes stacked on the floor of the cellar. Filling the rack, I discovered that of my original 17 1983 SWs and 6 1980 GCs, there are but two and one left, respectively. Time to find some replacements.

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[Miguel Simoes]

Beautiful!

[Andy Velebil]

In August the rack for 375s (and some 500s) finally arrived. I put it together in late August and installed and stocked it this past weekend. That's the good news. The bad news is I was lax with inventory record keeping when the bottles were just in boxes stacked on the floor of the cellar. Filling the rack, I discovered that of my original 17 1983 SWs and 6 1980 GCs, there are but two and one left, respectively. Time to find some replacements.

Coolio....maybe the dogs have been sneaking bottles at night.

[Eric Menchen]

Yeah, that's it. We always blame the dogs.

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[Moses Botbol]

We've been looking at homes and a port wine cellar is a primary consideration. I don't want to spend a lot on this muffler as I want utility, not show off. I like the crossed sections of wood that bottles rest on top of each other.

[Tom Archer]

A few observations:

1) Double depth racking makes for much better space utilisation.

2) Racking that goes right down to the ground is hard to access on the bottom row, and labels are prone to going mouldy down there.

3) Give each rack a number and each position in the rack a number/letter grid reference. Record where the first bottle of a stash is on a spreadsheet - trying to organise by vintage or producer will leave you wasting a lot of space.

4) On conventional wood/steel strip racks, wrap a small piece of silver duct tape over the horizontal front steel strip - this will stop it catching the back labels of the bottles.

5) If you need to use a chiller, look very closely at how it functions and regulates temperature. Chillers that use bi-metallic thermostats will knock the temperature down by about 2C (4F) and then cut out, cutting back in when the temperature has risen by the same amount - this can cause undesirable intra-day saw tooth temperature fluctuations.