Wine Storage Solutions
4I wanted to start this thread because:
- I just made some racks and wanted to share
- It would have been nice to see your solutions
These racks are for my excess wine that was in boxes on the basement floor. Note the empty spaces (not enough of them), awaiting de negoce shipments.
I bought 4 (one is in the wine cellar) Target 48" x 72" x 18" steel racks, and divided them with sections of 16" wire closet shelving from Lowes, all held together with zip ties. Cost about $100/rack and took about two hours to assemble each.
- 17 comments, 25 replies
- Comment
As long as you don’t live in earthquake country looks great!
@ScottW58 True. No earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes or floods.
@FritzCat Nice work… I would worry slightly about any light coming in from that window.
@ttboy23 Yeah, it’s on the North side of the house behind some cypress/cedar type trees. What concerned me more was the two incandescent can lights just above the top 6-packs. I was wondering what type of bulb I could use to generate the least heat.
@FritzCat LED floods will be less heat
@pjmartin I’ll swap them out today. Thanks.
Singlehandedly ridding the environment of excess styrofoam.
@FritzCat
Looks like a good solution and nicely affordable at around 50 cents per bottle if I am doing the math correctly. Nothing like what you did at your mother’s place, though. I’m surprised you didn’t dig up that thread?
@chipgreen That must have been around ten years ago! I still have those shelves in the cellar, moved them with the wine to our new house. They are more classic, but they took forever to build. I wanted a simpler solution, and really wanted to get some clever ideas from fellow Woo…, Casemates for all our benefit.
@FritzCat thanks for sharing! I like the dividers. They looked SO familiar and I was trying to figure them out then I read your explanation.
This is similar to what I have. Originally planned to use wood but the wines were coming in so fast from splits, etc.! I had to come up with a quick fix.
@FritzCat
I didn’t know you did that work so long ago. Was shared more recently, when KNmeh posted about the racks he built. There is another Casemates thread or two about racks and I know there were some threads about it on the old site. Personally, I took the easy way out and bought pre-assembled racks from Amazon.
If you check out the customer pics for this wine rack you’ll see mine in the last two.
They now have an almost identical but bigger rack for less money made by a different company HERE. It holds 15 more bottles and costs $20 less.
@chipgreen Very classy looking. And…less $ and work than mine. Mine look a little more densely packed. The cost of yours is compelling. And, it appears that yours are far more earthquake-proof.
@chipgreen Oenophilia, that was a great album. Always loved The Who.
@chipgreen @InFrom Shirley you jest. But I have listened to my Tommy Album scores of times.
@chipgreen @FritzCat @InFrom Who’s Shirley?
@chipgreen @FritzCat @InFrom @klezman Back in 2016 I ordered a 152 bottle “Black Metal Lattice” wine rack from Walmart. I built a locking cabinet around it so it is very stable. Relocated here to Missouri when we moved.
@InFrom
Wine, reign o’er me!
@FritzCat
Thankfully we don’t get earthquakes here either and only screwed into the paneling, don’t think I was lucky enough to hit any studs so they are practically free-standing but have not moved at all in 8 years.
One thing I am glad I did was to set the racks on 2"x10" planks instead of directly on the floor. That room has taken in water a handful of times but the bottles in the bottom row of the racks have been raised just enough to remain unscathed. Wish I could say the same about the overflow in boxes on the floor, haha but a little water damage to the labels doesn’t hurt the wine any.
@chipgreen @InFrom @klezman The proper response is “No, I’m serious, and please don’t call me Shirley.”
@chipgreen Yeah, my cats would use your cellar as a jungle gym. I can’t use any tags on bottles as that is like bait.
@chipgreen @InFrom @klezman @Mark_L Would be interesting to see a photo.
@FritzCat @InFrom @ScottW58
Clearly I need to dig a basement.
@rjquillin A real benefit of living in the North Country. One of few… A friend of mine, years ago, lived in Santa Rosa, CA and had a house built and did have a cellar dug just for his wine collection that he had moved from Europe. Very impressive!
Nice use of the styrofoam inserts - we have a smaller version with just four of the inserts stacked up 2x2 and tilted back against the wall (we do have earthquakes). I like the shelving frame idea.
If you’re looking for a very nice bulk storage solution, I’ve purchased a couple of these in the past that have been great: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Wine-Enthusiast-Professional-120-Bottle-Natural-Wine-Chiller/1000364629
@deadlyapp Sweet! Below is the one that I built…long ago.
And yes, it was cheap, but took forever to build.
I found this thread interesting, but I am struggling as I do not need anything as fancy as what was presented.
Does anyone have a method that I can take my current storage method to the next level, without having to build wine racks?
@Drez143 That your boxes are labeled is better than i did when living out of cardboard.
Depends what your goal is – just getting it out of cardboard? Get metal shelving, block off the sides, and stack away. Harder to get to the bottles at the bottom of a shelf, though.
If you want to be able to get to one bottle at a time, you’re gonna want wine-specific shelving. If your area is already climate controlled, look on Craigslist for a broken wine fridge/cellar which would already have racking. They’re usually cheap or free (just costly and difficult to move)
@Drez143 You’ve got a good start there, but you’re on a slippery slope…
Well it looks like you only have 6 cases? I don’t think I would call that a storage problem…yet
@ScottW58 plus the vodka should be in the freezer anyway.
Use the boxes that come with foam inserts. That’s an upgrade from the cardboard ones.
All good solutions. Boxes with foam inserts work well:
And a recent solution for my overflow…steel wire shelves, separated by pieces of steel wire closet shelving held together with zip ties. Had to buy a bolt cutter from Harbor Freight to cut the wire shelving.
@FritzCat Oh, this one’s at the top of the thread. Sorry to repeat.
I used to stack multiple cardboard boxes in 3 tiers, separated by a couple of horizontal wooden shelves, which were themselves held up by masonary blocks in between. These were all stacked within an enclosure that I’d built, using pieces of structural insulated panels (which a friend supplied me with). I could fit about 15 boxes, but the upper ones were pretty wobbly, and I got nervous playing ‘Wine Jenga’ when removing bottles from the upper tier, where the boxes were stacked 3 high on that last shelf. No pictures of that, but I finally bought some wire racks instead. Took all the shelves and boxes out, and put the wire racks into the same space.
I love these wire racks. I put 2 in, side by side- one is the 150 bottle rack, along with a 75 bottle one.
https://www.amazon.com/Sorbus-Wine-Standing-Floor-Stand/dp/B07PPQ9HDF/ref=sr_1_5?_encoding=UTF8&c=ts&dchild=1&keywords=Freestanding%2BWine%2BRacks%2B%26%2BCabinets&qid=1635689019&s=kitchen&sr=1-5&ts_id=2474048011&th=1
These racks seemed about the best ‘bottles for the buck’, along with the most bottles within the space. You definitely want to anchor them to the wall with the integral brackets, so they can’t tip. But then they are quite sturdy, and can fit 1/2 bottles along with full size, and fatter Pinot bottles too.
I think the racks themselves are great. Beyond that, I have those other large sections of insulated panels that I put across the front to complete the enclosure, which is in the coolest part of my unfinished basement, to keep the temps stable.
@drgonzo99 Looks very efficient. Thanks for the link. You’re serious about that insulation!
This is a x-post from a daily originally posted by @pmarin
@pmarin @dak52 @rjquillin Yeah it’s off-topic but the board is quiet so I’ll add-in some thoughts on “cellaring,” for those of us not lucky enough to have real “cellars.”
It really depends on climate you live and your house space available. In the Pacific NW I was able to get by with good-quality metal shelves, and just placing wine boxes on them horizontally (make sure the bottles don’t slip out onto the floor, though!). But most of the year the temp would vary between 55-70. But in a “daylight basement” (open to outside on one side only) it was mostly surrounded by dirt and concrete walls and remained fairly stable.
I once had a winemaker tell me it wasn’t the absolute temp as much as the daily variation that hurts the wine. So if it gets up to 70 or a bit more that is probably OK, but if it does that every day and then gets cool again at night, that bad! Sadly this is the one good thing about the styrofoam containers, they can help moderate daily variations in temp so the wine is happier.
But if you are in a hot place in Summer where it never cools off, yeah there’s more to do, either a nice wine refrig or good AC. You don’t need to keep it at “Cellar Temp” but best to be <65 and lower for “drink-now temp.”
Smaller wine refrigs don’t hold enough if you’re going to be buying cases here. You’d be surprised how easily you fill up a half-size (48 bottle) cooler. So then you’re talking either the really big ones (big, heavy and $$) or work out a backroom with some AC that keeps the extreme temps (and temp swings) from happening.
Honestly a lot of my wine is in “back of a hallway or basement” and that has been working for me but I’ll admit it’s not optimal. There are also some bottles stored on a Foosball table but that’s another story (maybe for the CyberPub – wait, there is a CyberPub again? I didn’t know – might have to pop in).
This is a x-post from a daily originally posted by @Nel250
@dak52 @pmarin @rjquillin
If you have a few bucks to spend but don’t want to go crazy you can get a Coolbot that will trick any AC unit to run below the set low temp. The Coolbot Pro can be connected to your network for control and will ping you if the temp is below or above what you want. I am very impressed by it. Just to get ahead of it, I do not work there nor will get any kickbacks for endorsing. I mostly lurk, rat when lucky enough, and buy a ton of wine from here including from back in the WW days.
This is a x-post of mine from a daily
@pmarin @takethefarm
There was an entire write-up on the old site how and why I did this, but here’s a pic of it.
Tank, regulator, flow meter and a trigger valve dispenser tube I insert into the bottle to purge.
Knowing the flow rate I can estimate how long it should take to fully purge the headspace of the bottle.
Pretty simple and I had most of the pieces in the garage already.
@pmarin said:
If only those were the ~only~ boxes strewn about the house…
The cylinder (pure Argon, as opposed to mixed gas) with regulators is a setup I had for a MIG unit. Likely most any welding supply house could set you up with those, or even Harbor Freight, which is where the hand nozzle and coil tube came from. I removed the actual nozzle and replaced it with some 1/4" tubing like you’d find on a domestic RO unit and is what I poke into the bottle at the liquid level. At the far left is an adjustable flow gauge I use to meter the flow rate. With a known flow rate, I use 1l/min, I know 30 seconds will fully purge an empty 750; adjust time from there not-empty bottles. You can fill a bottle and invert it in a bucket of water and time the purge to empty to verify your rate should you not want to pop for the gauge.
Thirty bucks on eBay will get you something like this
and you can just add the trigger valve and hosing from HF to finish it off, but you won’t know your remaining gas in the cylinder without that other gauge.
Niiiiice! I like the way you store your decanters.
I do mine upright with a sandwich bag over the top.
Gotta reconsider…
/giphy poof
