Re: Port wine cellar
Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2014 2:48 pm
Just a quick pic of my cellar.
Forum for Port, Madeira & Portuguese Wines
https://www.fortheloveofport.com/ftlopforum/
https://www.fortheloveofport.com/ftlopforum/viewtopic.php?t=18465
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.Tom Archer wrote:1) Double depth racking makes for much better space utilisation.
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.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 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.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.
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-clips4) 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.
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.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.
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!Michael T wrote:No it is wine, mead and a melomel.
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.Eric Menchen wrote:I'm actually in the process of replacing some of my probes and adding more so I can better tune the system. ...
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 itMichael T wrote:Just a quick pic of my cellar.