I just have wire restaurant racks made for wine, and I generally don’t stack bottles due to earthquake concerns. I would probably be fine in a minor incident, but the Cascade subduction quake will also do me major damage if hits in the next 5 years or so while I am in this house.
Having lived in Tokyo now 26 years, and being in the real estate business as a developer, I can assure you that it has far more to do with the building and the placement in the building than the storage device. By the time the energy gets to your cabinet/shelves etc. it will have either accelerated as in a poorly built building or diminished as in a well made building. Also the lower your storage is in the building the better as the acceleration and sway increases the higher up you are. A 50th floor space in a good building suffers less damage than the second floor in a poorly built one.
If the storage is in a ground level garage then much of the above advice regarding not stacking bottles but rather using shelving is very wise. Also if you use individual storage cabs. it will reduce the distance any given bottle can travel and will eliminate forward movement too. Affixing the cabinets to the walls is fine but base isolation is also just as viable if the building itself is likely to suffer damage. My preference is either a Forster/Eurocave solid door type or more recently the Dometic solid door type.
The safest I have seen here (and granted it was an importer’s own home collection) is a room in an apartment in a good building dedicated to storage and having the air-con running 24/7 with wines stores in styrofoam shippers.
You can order wine racks that have an 10 or 15 degree slant to minimize movement during earthquakes, so obviously, tilting your racks this amount would be beneficial.
The racks we had attached to the east and west walls threw bottles. None of the unattached racks threw bottles. If I reattach them to the walls I will incorporate some form of damper system.
I had planned on putting doors on the wine storage shelves, using 1X4’s and chicken wire but never got around to it. 10K mistake.
Then there’s the guy who came in the day after the earthquake asking if we wanted to sell his product. It’s a neck ring attached to the wine rack with heavy rubber band. A little too pricey for a retail wine store but obviously effective and may be the cat’s meow for smaller cellars.
Crazy! I was just thinking about this last night after leaving my offsite storage locker. I have my wines stacked directly on top of each other, similar to how a lot of cellars do in europe. Is it safe to have wines stacked 5-6 high in an earthquake prone area?
Depends on quake direction and whether there are other case stacked next to yours to dampen the movement. Wineries lost barrels stacked 8 high in our last earthquake. It’s as much about how much wine there is as how much they can move given the environment they are in. 5 cases stacked atop one another against a wall on the east side and nothing on the west side of the cases in an east/west shaker, you lose three and a half or four cases. If the room in packed full of cases, there’s no where for them to go unless the wall collapses.
I’m beginning to merge my wine over to the cabinet. The doors are secure and I can lock them so they won’t swing open. My problem area is on top of the racking where the large formats, Turley and bubbles will reside. It’s just not very stable when bottles are stacked. I’m looking for a way to remedy that to some extent.
It looks like the racks are so close to the doors that if the doors were secured closed the top bottles would not be able to fall to the ground. If you need to stabilize bottles on the top, run some kind of net across the top so it allows air flow but would keep bottles from falling. Seems like a lot of trouble for something that may not come for 20 years but it may be a safe thing to do when away or for peace of mind.
I don’t think I can afford that many socks. Or at least it’d be tough not to clean out a costco
Why not build a shelf just above the top metal racking, and use regular cardboard wine boxes to hold whatever you put up there? Yeah, you’d need to take the box out to get at a wine, but it would be pretty safe.
Secure the doors better, get rid of the top stuff, and I’d think you’d be fine.