When you are passionate about wine you start to collect it … and when you begin collecting it you need a place to store it.
A closet can easily be turned into a mini wine cellar to store your growing wine collection.
Before you begin converting your closet into a wine cellar consider the position of the closet relative to the rest of the house.
Avoid converting a cupboard against an outside wall into a wine closet. The outer walls of your home can often be subjected to wide temperature fluctuations across the seasons. Select an internal closet where your wine can be stored in a stable atmosphere.
The speed and the degree of the temperature change are critical elements to successfully storing and aging wine. A gradual change of a few degrees between summer and winter shouldn't be a cause for concern. A similar change each day will hurt your wines and age them too quickly.
A major rule when storing wine is to avoid large (or quick) temperature changes. You'll be aware of this damage straight away from the sticky deposit that often forms around the capsule. Over time the continual expansion and contraction of the wine will damage the integrity of the cork. It's just like having the cork removed and replaced every day. When this occurs, tiny quantities of wine can be pushed out along the edge of the cork (between the cork and the bottle neck) allowing air to seep back in. Once the air is in contact with your wine the irreversible process of oxidation begins and your wine is ruined.
At 55º to 58ºF the wine will age with grace, enabling it to develop fully. Higher temperatures will age wine more rapidly and cooler temperatures will slow down the ageing process. Irreversible damage will occur if your wine is stored at a temperature above 82ºF for a month or more.
The most difficult part of creating a wine cellar in a closet can be finding other places to store the original contents of the closet! You should be ruthless ... remove all the present contents (give away / auction / move them) and start with an empty closet!
Wine racks can be purchased quite inexpensively from a hardware store, online retailer or storage shop and you'll have a simple but very effective mini wine cellar.
Wine rack designs will vary in bottle density; price variations are more to do with aesthetics than efficiency.
Individual racking makes it easy to select bottles. If you place racks against only one wall of the closet you may still have floor or shelf space available for wines that you purchase by the case.
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