Port wine cellar

[Michael T]

Just a quick pic of my cellar.

[Eric Ifune]

Beers fermenting in the carboys?
If so, that's a pretty dark porter!

[Michael T]

No it is wine, mead and a melomel.

[Eric Menchen]

1) Double depth racking makes for much better space utilisation.

This may be true. However, if you want to do double-depth, I recommend buying racking that is designed for this purpose. If you use single-depth racking, you will end up with a gap in between because the racks are not as deep as a bottle (the neck sticks out slightly, more or less depending on the particular manufacturer). You might be comfortable with a gap, but someone visiting your cellar might not. I'm glad I was not involved, but I can report on a bottle somehow managing to fall between the racks at a friend's house. That was not a fun episode.

Personally, I didn't want to do double-depth because of the access issues. I find it easy to organize and convenient with single-depth, and wouldn't change that. Relative to the cost of the wine and racking, floor space for me was inexpensive.

2) Racking that goes right down to the ground is hard to access on the bottom row, and labels are prone to going mouldy down there.

I have no problem accessing stuff on the bottom row. And as I described above, my floor is insulated. Below the cork flooring, polyisocyanate, and pink foam board, the cement floor was sealed with a vapor barrier. The walls all have a vapor barrier as well. The humidity for my bottom row is no different from the top or middle. If your floor is not insulated and protected by a vapor barrier, mold might be an issue; but it need not be.

3) Give each rack a number and each position in the rack a number/letter grid reference. Record where the first bottle of a stash is on a spreadsheet - trying to organise by vintage or producer will leave you wasting a lot of space.

I have a rack grid system, with letters and numbers. I track where everything is, but I rarely use the letter-number combination in practice. I tend to know where most bottles are, and many are readily identifiable, e.g. Niepoort with the yellow capsule and year. I might not be looking for the 1997 Niepoort, but I use it as a reference.

I also organize by vintage and producer. That's the geek in me. Here's the bottom six rows of my Port rack:

grid.jpg (68.58 KiB) Viewed 1380 times

Bottles are in order by vintage and producer starting from the bottom left, working up.

4) On conventional wood/steel strip racks, wrap a small piece of silver duct tape over the horizontal front steel strip - this will stop it catching the back labels of the bottles.

It may not be visible in the photos, but my racking has small pieces of black plastic that cover the metal beneath every bottle for this purpose. My main racking is Bordex. The protective plastic pieces are called Protectex. Even on their website, the photo doesn't really show it clearly, but here it is: http://www.bordexwineracks.com/shop/acc ... ctex-clips
Here's a better rendering and image:

5) If you need to use a chiller, look very closely at how it functions and regulates temperature. Chillers that use bi-metallic thermostats will knock the temperature down by about 2C (4F) and then cut out, cutting back in when the temperature has risen by the same amount - this can cause undesirable intra-day saw tooth temperature fluctuations.

Yes, 4F is a very standard hysteresis band for chilling and heating units. On the one hand, you want a certain temperature. On the other, if you tried to hold within a degree, the compressor in the chilling unit would be cycling much too frequently and burn out. Note that the temperature of the temperature probe controlling the cooling unit isn't truly representative of the temperature of your wine, however, which should be more stable. At one point I had the probe in a 1/2 bottle of wine. Right now it is in the air. Both of those will fluctuate much more than the wine in big bottles.

I'm actually in the process of replacing some of my probes and adding more so I can better tune the system. For the cold/beer side of the cooler, the primary probe will be in a small vial (~100ml) of gel. I plan on putting multiple probes on the wine side. I'm going to record temperatures over time and see how much variation there is. With my controller I can have up to eight temperature probes connected, and I can control the chilling based on one, an average, etc., and I can change the temperature range ...

[Eric Menchen]

No it is wine, mead and a melomel.

While I brew beer, I love all of the above. But I've decided that others can do a better job making them than I, so I remain focused on beer. I'm lucky to have a local friend that is a master mead maker. Looks good Michael!

[Eric Menchen]

I'm actually in the process of replacing some of my probes and adding more so I can better tune the system. ...

This weekend I replaced all the probes on my cooler controller. I now have six probes, two for measuring temperatures on the beer side, one to measure the temperature of a thermal mass that is used to trigger the chilling unit, and three for the wine side. Yesterday I took a 750ml Belgian beer bottle, drilled a hole in it, filled it with freezer gel, and recorked it. I covered the hole I drilled with tape. It is in the racking now getting cold. Tonight I'll poke a hole in the tape and put one of the temperature probes in the bottle. This will capture the temperature of the wine in 750ml bottles. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the other probes, but I'll probably leave at least one on the wine side to measure air temperature.

bottle_1.jpg (35.1 KiB) Viewed 1352 times

bottle_2.jpg (91.57 KiB) Viewed 1352 times

bottle_3.jpg (71.69 KiB) Viewed 1352 times

[Allan Engelsted Laurents]

Wow Eric!
What a cellar, and what a system. it looks allmost like Igor Mendeleyevs Periodic Table from 1869!

I just moved this summer, and the only thing I didnt make sure of in my new house, was enough space for my Portwine!


I have room for 100 bottles, so I have to Stick with winefridges.

All the Best from
Allan

[Andy Velebil]

Eric,
Cool. I am curious to see what the results are from the ambient air one vs. the inside the bottle probe one.

Also, why did you use freezer gel and not water? Will the freezer gel stay colder for longer since it will freeze?

[Glenn E.]

Perhaps I just don't understand how it works, but wouldn't it be better to measure the ambient air temperature rather than the temperature inside a bottle?

Once the temperature in the bottle changes enough to register on the probe, it's already too late. You've already allowed your wine to be impacted by a temperature change. But if you're measuring the air temp, it seems to me that your cooling system could react more quickly and actually help prevent the wine temp from ever changing (significantly).

Or is the bottle probe used for some other purpose?

[Eric Menchen]

When you buy a wine cellar chilling unit, they typically give you a probe that goes into a bottle. Mine came with a waterproof probe and a special cap you put on a bottle that you fill with water. But I originally just put mine in to a 375ml bottle for the reason you mention Glenn. I didn't want the temperature of the bottles to swing that much. But, if you just leave the probe in the air, the chilling unit will kick on every time you open the door to the cellar, which is an overreaction. I'm not sure what I'm going to end up using. Today I moved one probe into the 750ml bottle. The others are still in the air. I might use the 750, a 375, or a mixed average ...

I used that gel instead of water for multiple reasons. For one, it won't spill as easily, nor will it be as likely to leak into the probe seal. Second, I'm thinking it won't evaporate as much. And I don't think it will freeze at 32F, but something more like 10F, although that shouldn't be an issue. I also have it on my beer side, where the temperature will get closer to 32, so a little safety perhaps. Some homebrewers have recommended using it in their discussions, e.g. http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/tempera ... ns-113129/

[Moses Botbol]

Just a quick pic of my cellar.

did you make those racks? I like that style racking and is what I'd like to go with. My port collection is spiraling out of control and I need to do something about it

[Michael T]

Yes I did, it wasn't too difficult.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[Eric Menchen]

I've upgraded the cooler controller to have six probes, and logged the temperatures for the last 24 hours, recording the temperatures every two minutes:



The two bottom lines are on the beer side, the three middle lines are on the wine side, and the cycling line is in a thermal mass that is making the chilling unit come on and off. Temperatures are in Fahrenheit. The 100ml sample on the beer side changing the most makes since, since I didn't open the door during the time period. I think the differences on the beer side and wine side are based on location, e.g. the wine side air sensor is near the ceiling, so about 1.8 degrees warmer than the 750 bottle below it. As tight as the temperatures are holding, I might adjust the programming so the chilling unit comes on less frequently.