Cellar conditions in an old farm

Hi guys,

I’m kinda new to this forum but I got a question straight away about cellar conditions!

Recently we’ve bought an old farmhouse dating back from 1890. It has a small 3m x 4m cellar where I want to keep my wines.

Our farm is located in Holland, below sea level, which makes it challenging to keep the water out, our cellar is no exception. Everytime it rains there is a little bit of water on the cellar floor, not much, maybe half an inch/1,2cm at most. It’s usually gone within 1 or 2 days. This is on the list of things we have to fix.

What concerns me most is the somewhat black mold that has build up on one of the walls (the one suffering the most from the water). It smells like… well, like corked wine really.

Today I’ve cleaned the whole wall with disinfectant and to keep any more mold from growing I’ve placed a de-humidifier in the cellar, this will keep it around 60% humidity. This is a temporary solution, we obviously want to completely seal the cellar, but until then…

My question is; is it safe to keep some wines in the cellar at this point? Considering the mold (that’s hopefully gone now) and the de-humidifier. And if you have a possible solution to water coming in the cellar, I’d love to hear that too… eventhough this is a wine- and not a DIY forum :slight_smile:

Thanks guys!

Julian

Can you install a vapor barrier? This with dehumidification may help.

“Cellar rat” is slang for winery worker. You’ll get a lot more eyes on this topic posting in Wine Talk.

My biggest concern would be the corked wine smell. It’s almost assuredly the same thing. TCA. It’s a byproduct of a mold and chlorine. It won’t get in the wines from he cellar, but getting on the bottles, then on your hands would be a real pain. I’d want to be sure it’s really removed, then no chlorinated water or chlorine products are ever used in the cellar.

Black mold is common in old passive cellars like that. Not the biggest concern, but something you can mitigate. Water getting in every time it rains is an issue. You’d need to solve that to fully solve the black mold issue. I’d be much more concerned about infrequent events where a lot more water might get in.

The solutions depend how the water gets in. One friend in the hills here had an issue with the cellar he’d built. It fended off normal heavy seasonal rain just fine. But, in an uncommon extreme event the soil saturated to a degree water seeped up through the floor. It took some engineering solution to prevent that from recurring.

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Black mold is a reason to stay away.