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The Curious Case of Wine Cases

Oct 29th, 2010 by

Most wine that we buy these days is either part of a case or once found itself nettled comfortably next its brothers and sisters in a nice, well built wooden case. Wine can also be placed in cardboard cases, but these days we all know better than to keep cardboard cases in our cold damp cellars.

On to the wooden cases. Many people prefer to keep their costly wines in the wooden case after purchase. The thought is that they are much more safe left to the confines of the wooden case. This is true in a lot of ways. Keeping your prized wine in the wooden case after purchase is a good way to keep light out and to minimize vibration. The idea would be to simply place the wooden case inside the cellar until the wine peaks or is ready to sell or drink.

This is a fine way to store wine long term, and we do have storage solutions for wine case storage. 

The other school of thought is centered around removing the bottles from the cases and placing them in a single bottle storage rack or diamond bin type storage. 

The up side to this type of storage is that the bottles can be stacked together as a case but cool air can surround the bottle a lot more easily. It is also easier for the bottles to be rolled slightly to spread out the sediment more evenly over time.

Either storage method is fine for both long and short term storage. The only type of case that one should shy away from storing in their cellar is cardboard. Cardboard can be a breeding ground for mold and mildew from its previous home. The other major problem is the transfer of insect eggs from one cellar to the other.

Happy Cellaring,

Christian Hancock
Wine Racks America

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Contemporary Metal Wine Racking

Aug 13th, 2010 by

The words "Wine Cellar" always invoke a near ancient image in the mind of wine lovers all over the world. Usually the image painted in ones mind is that of a dark grotto with old racks made of wood. Here in the new world we are blessed with a contemporary metal wine racking system known as VintageView®.

The VintageView® wine racking system is designed in such a way as to show off the bottle and its label. This minimalist approach is great for organization, ease of access and bringing your wine cellar into the 21st century.

Wine Racks

VintageView® metal wine racks can mounted to the wall or to a floor to ceiling mounting frame to create row after row of one, two or three bottles from floor to ceiling. Now is a great time to invest in metal racking as Wine Racks America is offering FREE SHIPPING on all of the VintageView® products. This could add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollar in savings that can be set aside for the purchase of more wine!

This summer VintageView® has unveiled their new custom color line that, when coupled with the classic black and platinum, allow for a variety of colors to suit any wine collector.

So take a few moments out of your busy schedule and call us or take a look at the Metal Wine Racks section at Wine Racks America.

Enjoy the sun and drink often,
Christian Hancock

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Summer Display

Jul 6th, 2010 by

The summer of 2010 is turning out to be a great season for wine lovers. With fine wine prices dropping, now is a perfect time to invest a few dollars into a long term storage solution for your ever growing wine collection.

Wine Cellar Rack DisplayWith high end wines dropping in price, many of us less wealthy folk can now afford to drink better wine. Wine Racks America has always had a great selection of stand-alone racks for small collections and modular cellar kits for those who can’t get enough of the purple stuff. Now is the perfect time to show off those lower priced estate wines with our solid wood & metal display trays.

  • Beautiful bronze finish looks amazing!
  • Sturdy & elegant design
  • No visible hardware
  • Displays your bottle at a 15° angle while keeping the cork wet

These unique display trays are found on any of our Wine Cellar Display Row Kits, Display Top Kits or Commercial Aisle Displays.

Cheers,

Christian Hancock
Wine Cellar Specialist
cellardesign@wineracksamerica.com
toll free: 1-888-373-6057

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Wine Cellar Design Tips

Apr 7th, 2010 by

We encourage our customers to bring their wine storage ideas to us so that we may assist with the design and implementation of their wine room. These designs come to us in a variety of ways and with varying levels of detail. Some clients send their entire residential or commercial floorplans with the wine cellar buried in a mountain of detail, others fax a pen and napkin drawing that they drew with their buddies the night before. No matter how we get these ideas, we assess each project individually and then attempt to fill in the blanks using the drawing.

If you are considering constructing a wine cellar of your own, you will save some time if you make sure to provide the following information along with your sketch:

  • How many bottles you wish to ultimately store.  That means plan on future additions to your collection and overestimate instead of underestimate the number.  It’s a lot easier to have a little empty racking when your cellar is done than it is to immediately start looking for ways to add more storage
  • Exact measurements – Our designs are very accurate, and variations in measurements often prove to be a headache during installation.  Make sure your measurements for the racking are inside dimensions and allow for wall coverings such as sheetrock, paneling and other wall treatments such as stone or tile
  • Whether the cellar will be temperature controlled or not.  This detail often gets left until too far into the project.  It is very difficult to “retrofit” a wine cellar space for a cooling unit, given that the walls, floors and ceilings are often inadequately insulated for active cooling.

Obviously there are many other details that you’ll need to address before your cellar is done, but these are a few of the biggest details that we often do not know when we receive a client’s sketch.  If you want more information on how to prepare your cellar for racking, visit www.wineracksamerica.com or contact a wine cellar specialist by calling 1-888-373-6057.

Cheers!

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The benefits of a water-based wood stain

Feb 24th, 2010 by

Here are five good reasons why a Water-Based Wood Stain is a great product to use inside a wine cellar:

  1. As we all know A conditioned wine cellar is a sealed space. Water based stain has no odor associated with it therefore, there will be no harmful odors trapped inside your wine cellar.
  2. The Water Based stain that we use at Wine Racks America can change an affordable Ponderosa Pine wine cellar into a rustic honey amber color that really softens the room.
  3. Most oil based stains have a lot of harmful odors that are associated with them. These chemical odors can, over time, penetrate the cork and ruin your wine. Water based stains are virtually odor free and are therefore wine friendly.
  4. Water based stains dry very quickly. This means that we can still build and stain your entire cellar in a matter of days as apposed to several days for most oil based products.
  5. Considering the outrageous cost of finishing wine racks these days, Wine Racks America stained cellar racks are very affordable and can fit almost any budget.
  6. If you have any questions concerning staining wine racks or anything else cellar related, please feel free to call or email me.

Cheers,

Christian Hancock
Wine Cellar Specialist
cellardesign@wineracksamerica.com
toll free: 1-888-373-6057

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The Importance of Home Builders Associations

Jan 8th, 2010 by

We here at Wine racks America are affiliated with a couple of local and the national home builders associations for a lot of good reasons. Here are the top five reasons that we have chosen to affiliate ourselves with the below mentioned groups:

  1. They promote local builders.
  2. The various organizations are a great resource when it comes to learning about a perspective builder.
  3. Most home builders association emphasis education. The associations encourage members to share knowledge about new building techniques as well as new ways to research problems.
  4. Local building association focus on community involvement. We all make a living in our local communities and it is good to know what the general public has to say in regards to building trends and codes.
  5. Being part of a home builders association allows a member to attend meetings where they can talk to other builders which in turn helps one expand their business into new areas.

    6. Home Builder Affiliations:

    Park City Area Home Builders Association
    Park City Area Showcase of Homes
    Home Builders Association of Utah

    National Association of Home Builders

    Cheers,

    Christian Hancock
    Wine Cellar Specialist

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Preparing Your Walls for an Active Wine Cellar

Dec 8th, 2009 by

Constructing a proper vapor-barrier is imperative if you’re planning to cool your wine cellar. Without an adequate vapor-barrier mold and mildew can develop inside your walls which will lead to costly repairs and severe damage to your home or business. It’s a simple process that is worth every penny.

View our Wine Cellar Construction Walk-Through

When Dealing with Raw Space the steps are easy and pain free. For those of you out there who are working with an existing room you may need to take a step backward to move forward. If you have to remove existing drywall to put up your vapor barrier do it; it’s worth it. Ideally the vapor-barrier would be applied under the studwork but it’s not necessary to alter the existing studwork. Simply wrap the vapor-barrier individually around each stud as illustrated in figure 2 in our Wine Cellar Construction Walk-Through.

Wine Cellar Vapor BarrierThe vapor-barrier should be at least a 6 mm plastic and applied before the insulation on the warm side of the wall. The insulation can be fiberglass bats, rigid foam, or blown in insulation. Pay attention to the rating, it should be a minimum of R-19 for your walls and R-30 for your ceiling. The insulation will be applied after the plastic on the cool side of your cellar.

If you want to save a step it is possible to apply the vapor-barrier and insulation with one step:
Using closed cell polyurethane insulation

When constructing your walls steer clear of anything that won’t do well in a damp environment. Remember, you are looking for a constant temperature between 55° and 58°F with 60% to 65% relative humidity. There are a lot of options for the walls so choose what you like. At Wine Racks America we do offer first class Tongue and Groove Wall Paneling. It can be purchased in ponderosa pine, premium redwood, or a stained version of either species.

To discuss this process with one of our Wine Cellar Specialists please call 1-888-373-6057.

Cheers,

Vincent Campbell
Wine Cellar Specialist

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Nothing to hide, but hidden anyway

Dec 8th, 2009 by

Wine Racks America is concerned about the safety and security of our customers. Accordingly, we have updated and put a number of technological protections in place to ensure that our transaction process is extremely safe and that our customers’ information remains secure. Security countermeasures include strict input validation routines, a 3-tier modular architecture, use of open-source cryptographic standards, and other secure coding practices.

We’ve already implemented the smartest security step of all – not storing credit card numbers to begin with.. like a bank with an empty vault. Once an order is charged to your credit card (via our secure checkout), only enough information to ship your order is kept. We do store the last four digits of your credit card so you can conveniently glance at your receipt and remember which card you used, but those four digits alone are worthless, like knowing only the last four digits of your phone number. That’s why if you’ve ever had to change an order you placed with us, we require your credit card information all over again.

Jason

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Relative Humidity

Nov 20th, 2009 by

Wine cellar cooling units often describe the “RH”, or Relative Humidity, that their products will maintain inside of a wine cellar. Relative Humidity is an often misunderstood concept, along its counterpart Absolute Humidity (AH).

According to Wikipedia, Absolute Humidity can be described thusly:
Absolute humidity is the quantity of water in a particular volume of air. The most common units are grams per cubic meter, although any mass unit and any volume unit could be used. Pounds per cubic foot is common in the U.S., and occasionally even other units mixing the Imperial and metric systems are used.

If all the water in one cubic meter of air were condensed into a container, the container could be weighed to determine absolute humidity. The amount of vapor in that cube of air is the absolute humidity of that cubic meter of air.

Relative humidity is defined as the ratio of the partial pressure of water vapor (in a gaseous mixture of air and water vapor) to the saturated vapor pressure of water at a given temperature. Relative humidity is expressed as a percentage.

Therefore in a wine cellar, RH is determined by measuring the content of the water vapor in the air at the specific temperature of the wine cellar (or the amount of humidity relative to the room’s temperature). Relative humidity is often mentioned in weather forecasts and reports, as it is an indicator of the likelihood of precipitation, dew, or fog. In hot summer weather, it also increases the apparent temperature to humans (and other animals) by hindering the evaporation of perspiration from the skin as the relative humidity rises. For example, if it was 80 degrees, with a relative humidity of approximately 75%, it would feel about 84 degrees.

Remember that your wine cellar should remain a stable 55 degrees with RH of 60%-70%. Some cellar cooling units allow you to dial RH in manually and let the unit do the rest. Those without the newer humidity controls can put a hygrometer in the cellar to determine the RH, and then tweak the percentage up or down using the cooling unit on its own or in conjunction with an active wine cellar humidifier that introduces moisture into the air.

Questions about humidity in wine cellars? Let us know by calling 1-888-373-6057.

Jeff

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5 Winter Wine Cellar Cooling Tips

Nov 4th, 2009 by

Once winter sets in and the cold surrounds us we tend to forget that our wines still need our attention. Here are five tips for keeping your precious wine safe during the winter months:

Wine Cellar Humidification Systems1. Perhaps the most overlooked element in a wine cellar is the humidity. This is a huge problem in the winter months because the ambient air is much more drier than in the summer months. One may want to consider adding a humidification system to their cellar to make sure that the corks don’t dry out. This is a very real problem in the dry arid West but humidity levels are also much lower on the East coast all through winter.

2. Winter is a great time to add a cooling system to your cellar. This is especially true in the warmer states. During the colder months the ambient air temperature around your cellar is much cooler than in the summer. This is important because your wine wont be exposed to warm air during the install.

3. You may notice that your wine cellar cooling system is working less during the cold months. The reasons are obvious of course. Take advantage of this "down time" and perform the necessary maintenance that all cooling systems require to function properly. Procedures such as cleaning the filters, cleaning the coil and even recharging the system if necessary.

4. Winter is also a great time to clean your cellar. Dust in a wine cellar is common and, in my opinion, adds a little character to the space. Never the less, the cooler months are a great time to clean the area because of the cooler ambient temperatures.

5. If your wine cellar is passive (no cooling system), then the winter temperatures could be too low for proper aging of wine. Place a simple thermometer/hygrometer in the space to make sure that the cellar is at least 55 degrees. Cooler temperatures will stunt the aging process and slow maturity.

Cheers,

Christian Hancock
Wine Cellar Specialist

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