As a wine connoisseur you are passionate about your wine collection and want to properly preserve it. Building a proper wine room in your home will ensure your investment is protected. While some wines are best consumed right away, many fine wines benefit from long-term aging and storage. If you are buying wines in order to allow them to mature, investing in a professionally built wine room is worth it.
Professional wine cellar designers would agree that aging wine is both a science and an art. Proper aging will have an effect on the wine’s bouquet and/or flavour. Wine, unfortunately, doesn’t have the sufficient amount of alcohol in it to preserve it indefinitely, but wines that do taste better with age can degrade quickly if they’re stored improperly.
If you are a wine enthusiast and collector, your needs for proper storage will be greater than those purchasing wine that is ready-to-drink. To maintain a large and valuable wine collection, you should contact wine cellar designers and builders in Calgary to help you plan, design and build a wine room in your home for your unique collection.
Factors for Proper Wine Storage
Elements that can ruin or enhance your wine collection include: temperature, humidity, ventilation and lighting. As a dealer and distributor of several types of wine room cooling and humidification systems, A wine cellar builder is well equipped to provide you with the best climate control solutions for your collection and space.
The ideal temperature for wine storage is between 11 and 14 degrees Celsius and must remain constant. Relative humidity levels should range between 60 and 80 per cent. This will make sure the corks in your wine bottles will not dry out. If it is more humid than that, you might get mould or mildew growth in your space and wine labels.
Your wine room will also be insulated with a vapour barrier to ensure that the cooling system isn’t strained and that it’s operating at peak efficiency while it maintains the right climate for your wine collection. The wine room door will also be of exterior grade and properly sealed.
The lighting in your wine room has to be suitable as well. Too much light can break down the complex molecules that create some of the unique flavours in mature wines. Though the darker glass used in wine bottles already does a decent job of protecting that wine, having it exposed to bright lights or direct sunlight for extended periods of time can diminish the quality.