I imagine many readers of this forum are a lot like me. Somewhat new to serious wine drinking, you begin accumulating bottles. First you keep them in the kitchen, maybe on a small wine rack, but soon you have to add more storage space as you continue to buy more than you drink. I made some nifty boxes for my pantry so I could accomodate about 30 bottles, but soon that wasn't enough either, so I made some space in the basement which had the added benefit of being cooler in the summer. But as I began buying more expensive wines that I wanted to age for a while, and began paying more attention to the temperatures I was exposing my wines to, I realized I'd have to do something better. I started looking at wine coolers, but realized that buying something with enough capacity was going to cost me at least $1000 (and who knows how much capacity you might really need as your wine obsession grows), and I was suspicious that anything containing a compressor couldn't really be vibration free. I imagined my precious wine molecules vibrating ever so slightly every time the compressor came on and I didn't like the image. Call me paranoid. What to do? I live in a house built in 1912 with a basement about 4 feet below grade in Louisville KY which gets hot in the summer. The foundation is made of big beautiful limestone blocks. Under the kitchen there is a small room that might have been a coal bin years ago. In the winter it's a perfect 55˚, but summer temps are well into the 70's. Here's my solution. I built a frame and hung a door onto the opening (one of the nice things about an old house is you find things like old doors stored in the basement so I was able to recycle one), removed the one existing window and installed a $160, 6000 BTU air condioner (I looked into wine specific units, but again was looking at over $1000 and most of them can't be vented to the outdoors). I went to my local Lowes and bought some $70 stainless steel storage shelving units with extra shelves - the larger one shown here is 4X6X18" (I have it set up with 8 shelves, each of which holds 20 bottles), the smaller is 2X6X18". When I first started the AC it wanted to run all the time and I realized I was cancelling out the benefits of being below ground, so I ordered a digital programable timer and set it to turn on for 1/2 hour every 2 hours but with slightly longer intervals at night when it's cooler outside, so that the AC unit runs a total of 4.5 hours a day. I'm thinking I will need to run it for 4 months out of the year, maybe a little more. I checked an internet calculator recently to try to estimate what that might cost and it came up with about $30. Not bad. Window air conditioners will only cool to 60˚ unless you get into them and figure out a way to trick the thermostat, but I am fine with 60˚. Although the air temp in the room is often at about 64˚ when I go into it, the bottle temp (measuring the wine with an instant read thermometer) is pretty consistenly 60˚ or slighlty less. Again, In the colder months the ambient temp drops to 55˚
The pictures pretty much tell the story. The white labels you see on the bottles are marked with the price I paid. The bottle with the signature is a 2005 Red Neck 101 signed by Steve Edmunds. The downside to a signed bottle is that it will be hard to bring myself to open it. I guess I'll have to go out and buy another.
