Since few of us are fortunate enough to have a handy cave to keep our wines in, we must figure out the best method to keep our wines healthy.

There are basically three enemies to wine .. temperature, light, and vibration. The hardest of these to control is temperature. Wine is a wonderful living thing .. it's born, grows to maturity and then dies. The time it takes to go through this cycle is greatly effected by the temperature that it is stored at.

Probably the greatest enemy is temperature variation. Large, fast swings in temperature drive wine nuts.

While the ideal temperature seems to be somewhere between 52 and 55 degrees, we know of many collectors that simply keep their wine in a room whose temperature stays somewhere in the mid 60's. If you want to keep your wines for 50 years, this might not be sufficient but we've had many wines from "cellars" that are kept in the 65 degree range and they are still great 20 years later.

If you are like us and really love older white wines ( we love old white Burgundies), then you will probably have to find a way to seek the 55 degree mark somehow. White wines are much more susceptible to warmer temperatures than are reds.

Unless you're fortunate enough to build a really elaborate cellar, the cooling/heating units will represent the greatest expense in your cellar construction. While we've been happy with the Breezair , we'd sure enjoy hearing from you about your experiences.

Ok .. you've received your favorite wine accessories catalog and are in the process of choosing a cooling unit for your cellar. If you've already build your cellar and are now trying to decide on a unit .... you started bass-ackwards !! Not only do you have to plan where you will mount/place the unit, where the electricity will run, where it will exhaust .. you also need to plan on the size of unit. In our opinion, this should be one of the first decisions you make. Heck, you might build this wonderfully large cellar, only to find out you can't afford the appropriate sized cooling unit !!

Most of the suppliers of these units provide a chart that shows number of bottles and cubic feet of space. Our only complaint with this method of sizing is that they don't take into account how well/poor you have insulated your cellar. Spending an extra $100 on more insulation can save you many $100's in cooling costs !!

When we selected our unit .. we actually went with the next smaller unit than the chart suggested. Our reasoning was that, once we had the cellar over 1/2 full of bottles, the actual mass of the cool bottles would aid greatly in maintaining a constant temperature. While this has worked for us .. we don't pretend to be experts. You will need to look at your own design to determine if you can do this.