The Basics of Adding a Custom Wine Cellar to Your Home

    Wine cellars capture the feeling of luxury like no other type of wine storage, and have price tags to match. Ordered by true wine connoisseurs or those who like to impress, wine cellars are an entire room devoted to wine. But unlike the rest of the rooms in a home, wine cellars require extra planning and an intense attention to detail.
    When you decide to build a wine cellar, you're committing to turn a room of your home into a cave - or at least to withstand the conditions of a cave. You see, the ideal temperature and humidity for wine was taken from the conditions found in the first place wine was stored: underground caves in Europe.
    "The underground caves is the temperature you are trying to replicate in your wine cellar," the VP of Operations at Wine Cellar Innovations, Tony Wilke, said. "So what we're looking for is 55 degrees actually between 55 and 58 and then your relative humidity between 55 and 75 percent."
    Essentially, when you create a wine cellar, you're turning a room into a giant refrigerator. Enabling a room to withstand those conditions without leaking the cool air or turning moldy takes strategic planning. There are a number of things to consider when building a wine cellar, and three important ones are the type of door, lighting and flooring you will use.
    When choosing a door for your wine cellar, you need to pick one that will adequately keep the cold air and high humidity from escaping.
    "You must be sure to use an exterior grade door because again," Wilke said. "You are building an environment where it is one temperature and humidity on this side of the door and another on the other side. So instead of using an interior door where you have that gap underneath, you need an exterior grade door sealed all the way around with a sweep on the bottom."
    In addition to choosing a special door, you must also choose your lighting wisely. Not all light bulbs and light fixtures should be used in a wine cellar.
    "There is some concern that ultraviolet light will harm wine for long term storage, so you want to make sure you don't use ultraviolet lights in your wine cellar," Wilke said. "For accent lighting, we typically use LEDs. One, because they last so long - between 50 to 100,000 hours, and number two because they don't have any UV rays in them.
As far as recessed lighting. If you're using a recessed can, you have to use an IC can which means it is insulated around because you don't want a hot light in a cold room or it will condensate."
     Once you have your lighting figured out, you'll want to look down and think about what you want under your feet. Flooring is a main feature in a wine cellar and will drastically help to set the mood in the room. You will want to choose an extremely attractive floor, because the floor will be exposed unlike other rooms in your home where it's covered by furniture. When picking out flooring, you have many options. Just stay away from vinyl and carpet.
    "You don't want to go with something with a vinyl base because with the high humidity in the wine cellar it will get underneath there and it will start to bunch up," Wilke said. "The second one you want to avoid at all costs is carpet. Number one because your carpet tack going around the perimeter will interfere with your wine racks and you'll have problems with the wine rack leaning forward. The second problem is that if your carpet stains and you get tired of it and you want to replace it, you can't because the wine racks are on top of it. The three most common are the hardwood floors, the porcelain tiles and the cork."
    Other than the built in features of a wine cellar, there are additional decorative accessories to think about. Many wine cellars incorporate paintings, decorative ceilings and fountains. Placing a decorative fountain in your wine cellar might seem a bit out of place at first; however, fountains help to increase the humidity in your wine cellar, which is an important part of preserving your wine.
    When it comes to choosing furniture for your wine cellar, you may want to stay away from dining room tables. While it may sound romantic hosting dinner parties inside a wine cellar, the temperature - only 55 degrees - can make it a bit uncomfortable.
    "It absolutely does get chilly in [wine cellars]," Wilke said. "We've found that a lot of people do request that, normally we try to steer people clear of that because many people will come back and say, 'Yeah, I tried that and we had two to three parties in there but it was just so cold we had to stop doing it.'"
    But if you have your heart set on a view of your wine cellar, don't be discouraged. There are ways to make eating inside your wine cellar possible.
    "An interesting thing people recently have been doing is building glass partitions around that room," Wilke said.
    Another option is to build a picture window from your dining room that looks into your wine cellar. But regardless of how you show off your wine, just remember a wine cellar is an expression of who you are.
    "People when they are building a large wine cellar, it's really a statement about themselves," Wilke said.
    So take time when picking out the details. Make sure you love every part of it, because I'm sure it's going to cost you. Plus, if you're going to invest that much time in it, you want to make sure it turns out right.