Home and Lifestyle - Beer, Wine and Spirits

If you have a growing wine collection a closet can easily be turned into a mini wine cellar to store it.

Before you build your mini wine cellar consider the position of the closet in relation to the rest of the house. Avoid converting a closet located against an outside wall into a wine cellar. Choose an internal closet where your wine can be stored in a more stable atmosphere. The outside walls of your house or apartment may experience wide fluctuations in temperature.

The degree and the speed of any temperature change are critical to successfully storing and aging wine. A gradual change of a few degrees between summer and winter won’t matter. The same change each day will harm your wines by ageing them too rapidly.

The most difficult part of converting a closet to a mini wine cellar can be finding other places to store the original contents of the closet! Be ruthless … give away / sell / move out all the present contents and start with a blank slate!

Purchase some inexpensive wine racks from a hardware store, online retailer or storage shop. Wine rack designs will vary in bottle density. Price variations have more to do with aesthetics than efficiency.

Individual racking is the most convenient for selecting bottles. If you have racks against only one wall of the closet you may still have floor or shelf space available for wines that you purchase by the case. Now fill the racks with your wine bottles and you’ll have a mini wine cellar in a closet!