The wine room.
A cabinet, a cellar or a room. The choice follows from how much wine you keep and how long you keep it.
A note on the photograph. The image above shows a residential bar and drinks room with bottle shelving; it is not a dedicated climate-controlled wine room. It illustrates the cabinetmaking end of the work. The guidance below applies to wine cabinets, cellars and purpose-built wine rooms alike.
Three answers, in order of cost
Under about two hundred bottles, and if most of them are drunk within a year, the right answer is usually a conditioned cabinet built into joinery. It costs a fraction of a room and it works.
If the house has a cellar, a vaulted undercroft or a north-facing basement, use it. A passive cellar that sits between 52 and 57 degrees all year needs racking and a light, not a refrigeration plant. Measure it over twelve months before you spend anything.
A purpose-built room is for a collection that is being kept rather than consumed, or for a house where the wine is meant to be seen. It is a small insulated building inside your house with a cooling unit on it, and it should be designed as one.
Conditions
Fifty-two to 57 degrees is the target. Stability matters more than the number: a steady 59 does less harm than a swing between 50 and 64 every week. Humidity between 55 and 75 percent. Below about 50 percent corks dry out; above 80 percent labels lift and mold appears on the racking.
Darkness, or LED light on a switch rather than a sensor. No vibration, so not against a mechanical room wall or under a gym. No strong smells, which rules out storing wine next to the heating oil or a paint store.
The cooling unit has to reject its heat somewhere. That somewhere is a real design decision, not a detail, and it usually means a through-wall unit venting into a mechanical space or a ducted split system.
Racking
We cut racking to the bottles, not to a standard. A Bordeaux 750 is three to three and an eighth inches across, a Burgundy three and three eighths to three and a half, and a champagne bottle up to three and three quarters. If you cut every bay at three and a half inches your champagne lives on the floor.
Single-depth racking is 12 inches deep, double-depth 24. Diamond bins at 20 inches internal square hold roughly ninety bottles of one wine and are the cheapest storage by volume. Case shelves want 20 and a half by 14 inches, and eight and a quarter clear for a standard twelve-bottle wooden case.
Allow 36 inches minimum between facing racks and 40 to pull a case out and set it down. If there is a tasting table, 43.
Timber, steel and finish
European oak is the usual choice and it behaves well at high humidity. Walnut and iroko both work. We avoid strongly aromatic timbers in a sealed room, because a cork is porous and a room that smells of resin will eventually be a wine that does.
Racking can be left unfinished, or given a hard-wax oil. We do not spray solvent lacquer inside a sealed wine room. Steel components, where a room wants a lighter frame, are black-oxidized or blackened mild steel.
Everything is dimensioned to the bottle and drawn at full size before it is cut, which matters more here than almost anywhere else, because a bay an eighth of an inch too tight is a bay that never gets used.
Glazing and the door
A glazed wall makes the room part of the house rather than a cupboard in the basement. It has to be a sealed insulated unit with a warm-edge spacer, or it will run with condensation on the warm side every summer evening.
The door needs a full compression seal on three sides and a drop seal at the threshold. A beautiful door that leaks air is a cooling unit running all night. The whole envelope, including the ceiling and the floor, wants insulating and a vapor control layer on the warm side.
We make the joinery, the glazed screen and the door as one job, on the same drawings, so the reveals line through. The conditioning equipment is specified with a refrigeration engineer, not by us.
The cabinet answer, done properly
Integrated wine cabinets come in 12- and 24-inch widths and sit in a kitchen or dining run like any other column. The housing needs ventilation front and back to the manufacturer’s figures, and it needs to be drawn so that the appliance can come out in ten years without dismantling the room.
A wine cabinet in a Kensington run with a book-matched surround reads as furniture rather than as an appliance. In a Suffolk or Scandi kitchen we usually put it in the scullery or the dining end, away from the oven.
Tell us about the room.
Where the house is, roughly when you would like to be cooking in it, and what you have in mind. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.
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