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A nice combination of home built and purchased outfitting ... Art & Betsy

Stephen writes ........

Our cellar is located in a room off the main finished basement, a room that originally may have been used as storage for home canning products like preserves, jams, or canned tomatoes (a favorite in Minnesota). The house was built in 1917, but there is no evidence that the room was used to store wine previous to our moving in 15 years ago.

The room itself measures about fifteen feet long by ten wide.  Two sides face entirely into earth, one side is a common wall with the basement, and the upper half of the fourth wall is exposed to the outside air.  I have insulated all walls that have any outside exposure.  The cellar temperature fluctuates very slowly winter to summer over a range of approximately 55 to 65 degrees.  I have never noticed any temperature-related effect on any of the wines, many of which have been stored in the cellar since we moved in.

Present capacity is about 1,400 bottles, although I am expanding racking

As the following photographs indicate, the cellar is a mix of ad hoc, home-grown design and use of standard cellar bins and racks. I've taken few pains to make it look "pretty" but it has functioned well and is tied very successfully to my cellar management software, Winebase.

This individual bottle rack has a 120 bottle capacity.  I use it primarily for lots that have only a single bottle, usually because I've consumed all but that one over time.  I then move the single bottle to this rack, often freeing up a bin.  My oldest (rarest) single 750 ml bottles also are stored here, although I'll soon be moving them (and bottles identified for current consumption) to a temperature-controlled credenza in the dining room.

Here is pictured the first bin system I designed and constructed.   The frame is 2x4s; principal rack supports are 5/8" plywood running from upper left to lower right; bin separators are 3/8" plywood resting on 1/2" pine blocks nailed into the 5/8" plywood strips.  At the upper end the 5/8" plywood strips rest on 1/2" dowels running between the outer and inner frames.  At the lower end they are anchored by another set of 1/2" dowels (i.e., the dowels are placed above the strips, and the dowels and the floor limit any lateral movement).   Principal support vectors are transmitted to the 5/8" plywood strip ends resting on the floor and to the 1/2" dowels top and bottom.  Some trigonometry was necessary in order to properly locate the dowel positions.  Special provision had to be made for anchoring lower ends of the 5/8" plywood terminating in the right hand frame.My few magnums are stored atop the upper frame -- a couple can be barely seen in the upper right corner

This photo shows the design in closer detail.  Note that using this design bins can hold four, eight or twelve bottles.  The design did not accommodate the over-wide diameters of some Burgundy and California or Oregon chardonnays or pinot noirs, so that can restrict bins to three, six or nine of those sized bottles.  Bins are designated by a "column" (running top left to bottom right) and "row" (bin counted from the top of the column) -- e.g., "A3," "D8," etc.

This is a straightforward purchased individual bottle rack.

This detail shot shows the column designations.  Since the rack has three vertical sections, individual locations are tracked in my cellar management software as, e.g., "K2-4/6" (column "K", section "2", individual positions "4" through "6").

Here are two sets of the four commercially-purchased diamond bins, with both open and closed wooden cases stored on top.

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