Cellar advice

I am curious about everyone’s opinions on here about a cellar at a house I’m moving into. I’m not really the biggest fan of the diamond bins and thinking of changing out these for normal cubbies. Thoughts?
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These pictures posted very awkwardly!

Hate diamond bins. Had them in my first cellar (27 years ago?) and didn’t put them in my next two builds. Pain in the ass unless all of you bottles are the same size.

And the same wine!

I had a few diamond bins put in my wine cellar because I thought they would make the whole cellar look prettier. I wish I had not done this. If you stack wines even a bit high, they start to get unstable, even if you put in the same wine or wines of the same size. Maybe if I only used Bordeaux shaped bottles in the bins they would work better, but I even have stability issues with half bottles of German wines (e.g., a bin of Prum auslesen) and half bottles of Burgundy.

I would re-do the racking if I was in your position.

Ok, wanted to confirm that it was a good idea to spend the money to get new storage. This is what we are working on now, seems ok?
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I like my cube bins, despite many naysayers. Prolly more functional than diamond bins.

And, it’s kinda cool that you joined ten years to the day after this Board started.

Tip the rear down a little if you live in California.

We have just about every kind of bin at the store. Each provide adequate storage, but for retail, display is an issue and hunting down wines in a diamond is a pain in the arse.

You are talking about home racking and diamond can be efficient in the appropriate environment. If you don’t have enough of a single wine to fill a cube, you might waste space. Bottle tags can take care of that issue. $12,000.00 in engineered racking in you house, half empty because you drank the other half, versus placing like bottles in marked bins with bottle tags, for $12.99.

Very cool, didn’t know that. I am mostly a stalker on here but slowly coming around to the idea of posting more.

Best advice. Didn’t think of the SF is home and main reason I worry about quakes and the very full diamond bins.

I typically buy several bottles of something we like so we can try throughout the years. This build is about $5k in SF. Just worry about having to dig for a bottle in diamond bins and something dropping. Or if there’s a quake the bottles dropping off.

Yes! Kill the diamonds!

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Both diamonds and cubes are a pain if you have different bottles and different shapes. Try putting a few Rhone shapes and a few Bordeaux shapes and a few extreme Rhone shapes into either a diamond or cube. But they’re more efficient than individual slots. If you have the space, go for individual slots. If not, I’d go for diamond over cube because the bottles won’t roll around when you pull one out. And yes, they’re a pain if you have a full bin and you want the wine on the bottom.

And don’t make them perfectly level, as suggested. Tip them. Won’t help in a big quake, but will definitely help with some of the smaller ones.

Two nice things about these:

  1. They are very dense
  2. They have some Earthquake protection, assuming you anchor the bins.

-mark

I built all of my own racking and did one unit of diamond-like bins. It is for impulse grab/daily drinkers and gets bins with multiple bottle shapes haphazardly installed. Bottles fall into the middle all of the time (it is two sided with necks intentionally facing in because of the tip problem). I hung an old flannel bed sheet on a dowel in that middle space to catch the in-falling bottles to prevent breakage. So far, so good, but I didn’t build any more of this style of bin given the result. I think that the design could be refined a bit to tilt the bottles and add a catch net at the back of the bin, but I’m happier with my single-bottle rack solution.

fred

Go with double deep individual bottle racking. You will never regret it.
Here are a couple of examples.

http://www.winerackshop.com/208-bottle-double-deep-wood-wine-rack.html

If your handy, build them yourself.

Taken with an iPhone? Same thing happens in e-mails sometimes.

Before forwarding or posting, edit the image somehow – the most fractional cropping will do, or a slight adjustment of the horizon, just a pixel change. Save it and the orientation will be correct.

On the plus side, they’re diamonds from all angles.

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