wine storage / temp control necessary?

Moving into a new home soon and would love any thoughts on storage. I’ll try to summarize succinctly: home is almost brand new, very open floor plan but no basement. In other words, no natural place for a cellar. Has a built in little bar area with 36 bottle wine fridge. My storage needs: I’d like 300-500 bottle capacity, but I’m not aging fine bordeaux / burgundies for decades or anything. Vast majority of my wine is $15-50 range, some decent stuff but nothing super premium. I also have access to a proper wine cellar nearby if I want to store/age a few cases of really good stuff (parents live in same town and have a cellar).

I guess my main Q is, do you think I need temp control storage (fridges) or am I good with just some racks, as long as they don’t get sunlight? My thinking is the house will be pretty well climate controlled, and my wine isn’t too fancy, so do I really need temp control?

Would temperature control be best for your wine? Yes.

Do you really need it if you intend to drink your wine in the near term and your home never gets terribly hot? Probably not.

For now, I’d keep your best wine or wine you’d like to age in the little fridge or at your parents’ place and see how your wine hobby develops. Keep an eye out and see if a bigger unit comes up for sale at a good price, and give some thought to where in your home it could go. You always have the option of adding something when you are ready.

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This is very sensible advice, IMHO.

That said, the actual ambient temps in your house are relevant. If it never gets above 70 year round and you plan to drink in the near-term, I’d never give storage another thought (beyond sunlight and keeping bottles horizontal).

If it climbs above 80, that’s the danger zone.

Between 70-79, it will depend on your palate, the wine (eg delicate vs robust), and how long it stays at that temp (2-3 months should be fine).

Thanks Sarah and Pat for the thoughtful replies. I’ll probably have to see what temp our home is / whether it fluctuates much and then decide whether it’s worth buying a large fridge. If it’s consistently 70 degrees +/- a couple I prob won’t need anything unless my purchasing habits change

Seems your electricity bill would probably be cheaper buying a wine storage unit than trying to keep your whole house at 70.

You did say you want 500 btls.

Guess it depends where the house is, geographically speaking.

A pretty consistent temperature is important. A few degrees higher or lower than ideal isn’t going to matter too much, especially if you aren’t looking at long term aging. If your wine is constantly going from hot to cold each day that is not so good.

Buy, Buy, Buy !
You may evolve into one of US !! [drinkers.gif] [wow.gif] [snort.gif]

I just built a passive wine cellar in my basement. 2x6 walls and 2" foam insulation. 4x8 inside and storage for 500 bottles.

A few weeks after completion and it’s sitting at a rock solid 66F and 65% humidity. I have a sensor outside in the basement which moves from 65F to 69F throughout the day and humidity fluctuates as well. Easy to tell when the AC kicks on. We keep the main floors at 75F in the summer.

But so far, so good. I’ll know if it’s good enough in August when the ground temp peaks. If it’s still at 66F, I’m not going to consider active cooling. Cellar will probably get down around 55F in the winter and I can live with and 10F swing slowly over a year.

For your needs as you describe them, you can get by without temp control. The question, IMO, is what are you trying to achieve by aging this type of wine, even if more short or medium term aging? They aren’t magically going to turn into 20-30 year old Grand Crus or First Growths by aging in less than perfect conditions for a few years, or even if you had perfect storage conditions. Why accumulate 500 bottles of wine that are going to be consumed within a couple years of purchase? Odds are, two bad things could happen. Some might be affected slightly (negatively) by your passive conditions. Others bottles, and it happens to all of us, turn out to be wines that you are no longer terribly excited to drink. I just gave away 6 btls of nice port (going back to 1963) to a neighbor because I don’t open them anymore. Why not just buy a smaller number of bottles for near term consumption, and as your tastes change, buy some more of things you like at that time?

Great advice
500 bottles of near term drinkers sounds like a whole lot of, “variety is the spice of life” (or maybe a lot of repetition I suppose).
After you accumulate 500, are you going to stop buying?

Very good / fair points for sure. I guess my answer would be a combo of 1) I do have a number of bottles that I think aging benefits (mostly domestic cabs / blends, and a smaller handful of Rhone / Burgundy / Barolo / Brunellos…again, not stuff that will be held for >10 years though). 2) I enjoy having a wide variety of producers, or being able to buy say 6-12 bottles of a young napa cab now and trying them over time. I’m not too worried about losing enthusiasm for any wine, my tastes are broad and I rarely try decent quality wine I don’t enjoy. 3) If I’m being honest, the main reason I have more wine than I should is because it’s too damn fun to buy it. I should probably keep 150-200 bottles, not 300+. Unfortunately the correct solution seems to be “don’t buy wine” :wink:

It seems these wine journeys all end up going in the same direction and I’m sure I’ll end up with a huge fridge or figuring out how to get a cellar in the house, especially if I start exploring Old World wines more.

Thanks again for all the feedback!

For the first 10 years my storage conditions were by decidedly suboptimal. Yet, I have had bottles that were aged under those conditions that were quite nice at 5-8 years. A few bottles moved to my current cellar and showed no issues related to the early storage conditions at 20+ years but those were Early 90s cabs (étude, Shaffer, Forman).

You got that right… pileon [wink.gif] [cheers.gif]

I may differ a bit from the groupthink here, but I’d suggest getting a stand-alone wine cellar that you can fill as you need it. There are a LOT of excellent wines in the $15-50 range that do improve with age, you don’t only see improvement in the cellar with $200+ bottles, you can see it with $15 Muscadet. I think good storage not only allows whatever wines you have now the best opportunity to age nicely, but gives you the space to put nicer bottles in when you get them, which you probably will if your wine journey continues on like it does for most of us. Look in your local Craigslist for a used unit, you can probably find something around $1000 that will last you a while.