There comes a time in every wine drinker’s life when the thoughts of having a wine cellar of your own goes from a casual idea to a compulsion. Having cases stuffed in closets and loose bottles every where can not only get old, but it’s no way to treat that killer bottle that you have been saving for just the right occasion. Wine cellars come in two basic flavors. The all in one ready to go right out of the box is option one. These portable cellars can hold anywhere from a few bottles to several hundred all in temperature and humidity controlled comfort. Modular designs make them expandable and most offer two or more zones so that you can age reds and have ready to drink whites on hand in the same unit. Another plus is that when it’s time to relocate, your cellar can go with you. Option two is a dedicated piece of real estate designed and built to hold an existing and ever expanding number of bottles. Just saying the words “wine cellar” conjures up a vision of some ancient subterranean cavern carved deep into solid rock. Great wooden horror movie doors creak open to reveal rows and rows of racks brimming with dust covered bottles from all over the known wine world, some going back centuries. While admittedly, that is the cellar that everyone wants, often the harsh light of reality makes us opt for plan “B”. My first two houses were in the northeast. Both had basements which made conversion to wine storage a relative snap. Upon moving to southwest Florida, I found that if you dig down six feet, you hit water. While this may be good for the well drilling industry, it does pose some challenges for wine storage. One or more self contained cellar would fill the bill, but I just didn’t want to go that way. Besides, the big furniture quality units are expensive especially when looked at on a per bottle basis. What I needed was a sort of hybrid system that could become part of the room without taking over the house. After several concepts that all ended in my wife saying “no”, I came up with the idea of having a built in unit that would run the length and height of one wall while only be about two feet deep. It would be eight feet long, but have two out swinging three foot doors that would allow direct access to six feet of cellar and the ability to reach around to the other foot on each side. To add to the coolness factor, the entire cellar would be made of store front style glass resulting in a glass box framed in white aluminum. Add floor to ceiling redwood racks and some lights and we are talking stellar cellar! My original budget was “whatever it costs”. My wife whittled that down a bit and we settled on $5,000ish with an emphasis in the “ish”. After some serious design work in a bar on the back of a cocktail napkin, I was ready to bring in the professionals. The actual box would be built on site by Sanibel Glass. It would be double-paned with a one inch air space which should increase the insulation factor nicely. For racking I went with case size bins that ran the entire length of the cellar resulting in four bins wide by five bins high. This would keep the heavy lifting to about the four foot high level. On top of that went single bottle racks that came a bit short of the ceiling which allowed for good magnum and Champagne storage along the top. Total capacity would be around 550 bottles with extra room on the floor for large formats and odd sized bottles. Cost would be roughly $9.00/bottle. For a cooling unit, I went with a Breezaire WKS220 Series split system (compressor is outside, blower inside the unit) which was rated for 265 cubic feet (I only had 128 cubic feet to cool). Rated means that this unit properly installed in a properly insulated box would easily hold 55 degrees year round. At this point I knew that the ceiling was insulated and I assumed that there was insulation in the walls. This minor factor came back to bite me later. The first day of construction had the glass box completed. I was psyched; in my mind I saw the soft glow of the redwood and the gleaming rows of bottles. When my wife came home, she saw a big empty glass box where a foyer wall used to be. After looking at it for what seemed like an hour she finally asked “How much would it cost to take it down?” It was like a dagger through the heart. But damn it, this was my castle and my dream so I did what any self respecting guy would do. I begged, pleaded, and offered to buy her shoes (thank god for the internet and hearing the word “Manolo’s somewhere). It was the shoes that sealed the deal. From then on, things came together surprisingly well, on schedule, and under budget. Within a week or so, the racks were in and the cooling unit was humming along as the temperature inside the cellar slowly sank. By the time it was 60 degrees in the box, I was already on my way in a rented truck to liberate my wine from the Bastille. When we moved from Chestnut Hill, just outside of Philadelphia, I had my wine picked up in a refrigerated truck by Western Carriers and whisked down to a temperature controlled wine storage facility in Naples where it has remained for the last few months. The whole time it felt like having a kid away at boarding school and while doable, it did make me feel like a bad parent. When I started to load the cellar, the temp was still in the low 60’s, but the install guy did say that it would take a few days to hit and hold 55 degrees. Since the doors were wide open for hours, I gave it another day or so and the thermometer kept saying 63. More disturbing was the fact that the cooling unit had never once cycled off in what was now about a weeks worth of cooling. A few days later, I placed a call to Breezaire. They basically said that either I was a moron or that the professional installation people were morons and that their unit was definitely NOT the problem. In the intervening days more calls were placed to Breezaire, the install folks come out several times to check connections, gas levels, the cycles of the moon, and who knows what else. Every once and a while one of the guys would ask, “These walls are insulated right” and I would sheepishly nod. Still the thermometer mocked me by saying “63”. By this time, it had become painfully evident that the walls were not insulated.At night I would lie awake in bed listening to the barely audible yet unceasing hum of the fan with thoughts of “55” dancing in my head only to be slapped the next morning by “63”. And this was in February. What would happen when it actually got hot?Well what happens is the temperature slowly creeps up to 65 in the summer then slowly cruises back down to about 57 in the winter. After living with this for way too long, I finally called in the pros from Dover. At this point, my options were Apex Wine Cellars and Spas which have offices all over the country with their nearest one about two hours away in Tampa or another equally distanced outfit out of Miami.After some price comparisons and just getting a better vibe off of Apex I signed the deal. Now you have to remember, I have 400+ bottles of wine that have to go somewhere while the racks are removed, the sheetrock from the ceilings and walls are ripped out, insulation is sprayed in and every thing is then put back together. This would involve three different crews over the course of about a week to ten days.My options were to put the wine in storage (again) or get creative. And creative I got. I put an over sized window air unit in a spare bedroom and cranked it up. For storage, 2x4’s went over the waterbed in the spare room with ply wood on top of that which made a nice level platform for all the wine that was then transported (in proper order by region and vintage) and stacked. Some how, the whole thing did not come crashing down into a watery red river of broken glass.I am just glad that my wife works a lot. The transition was pretty smooth, but what a mess! On the up side, it made for the perfect excuse to both reorganize and catalog the cellar which is pretty useful. On the down side, it cost about $4,200 for the redo which included framing the entire inside in redwood which really looks great and running a dedicated circuit.Was it worth it? Yeah, it really was. The cellar got fired up on January 15th, 2009 and it has never varied by as much a degree. Not only that, but it came down to temperature and held it in a little over an hour. It is set to 55 and it always reads 55. This thing works so well that I thought maybe it was a fake thermostat, so I turned the cellar off for a while and it slowly started to get warmer. It is now just over a year later. After months of 95 + degree Florida summer heat, the cellar is hanging tough.Would I have saved a boat load of money by doing it right the first time? No doubt about it. But maybe my mistakes can save you a few bucks.While I used Apex and can only vouch for them, I am sure that any cellar outfit that has been around for awhile can provide the same products and services. If you are shopping around, get references from customers and call them. Ask the company how long they have been in business, how long the warranty lasts, what does it cover, and how long can it be extended. And don’t assume your damn walls are insulated! If anyone has any questions, please feel free to contact me. There is no reason why you should have a bad experience as long as you do things the right way.John MiksaDRINK MORE WINE
