Perks of Adding a Home Wine Cellar to Your Conrado Home

One of the advantages of building a custom estate is that you have enough space to include all of those luxury rooms you have always dreamed of having in your home. An indoor pool and spa to refresh and relax, a games room to spend time with the family, or a home cinema to take your digital entertainment to a new level: all of these possibilities can be incorporated into the floor plan during the pre-construction phase with Conrado Home Builders. 

Adding a wine cellar should be a no-brainer for wine lovers and connoisseurs. Having a perfect place to preserve your wine will allow you to keep it in optimum condition for more extended periods while also reducing the temptation to pop a bottle that you plan on keeping for years. In this short article, we take a look at some of the most important considerations for building a quality wine cellar. We then look at the top three perks of adding a home wine cellar to your Conrado home before explaining why Conrado Home Builders is the best option for helping you build the highest quality wine cellar for your custom home.

Considerations for Building the Best Wine Cellar

Let’s start with what you don’t want. When you walk into your future wine cellar, you don’t want it to resemble a musty, dirty, and poorly lit cave where you have to stumble over poorly organized boxes and racks of wine, hopelessly searching for a wine that may have been ruined due to extreme fluctuations of temperature and humidity.

The best wine cellars are spacious rooms strategically placed in the home to make for easy access to that important beverage that should always be close on hand. Furthermore, a good wine cellar will include different types of storage and organization and may will be near your dining room or other entertaining areas. The wine cellar should be well-insulated and conditioned to ensure proper and stable temperatures and humidity levels to preserve your wine. Let’s take a closer look at these features of the perfect wine cellar.

• Right size: For amateurs in the world of wine, you might think that a small, 25-square-foot wine cellar might be more than enough to store your paltry collection of wine. As a general rule of thumb, however, you should always seek to build your wine cellar bigger than you think you will ever need, as once you begin collecting, it is hard to stop. Having the extra space is extremely important to properly store your growing collection.
• Easy and strategic access: If you are building a new custom home from scratch, it is essential to consider the placement of your wine cellar. Occasionally, placing a wine cellar next to the kitchen or dining room makes it easy to have your favorite wine on hand while serving dinner. You may also place the wine cellar next to another entertaining room, such as a home bar. Inside the walls of the wine cellar, it is also vital to design wide walkways to make it easy to move around and access your wine.
• Alternative storage options: Your wine cellar should also ideally create different options for storage. Loose, individual bottles need to be stored horizontally on racks. Storing individual corked bottles horizontally will keep the cork moist, which is vital for long-term storage, as a dried cork can cause seepage and premature aging. If you purchase wine in bulk that comes in wooden cases, there should be a separate storage area to stack those cases.
• Proper temperature and humidity control: Lastly, it is imperative to build a wine cellar that does its job of properly regulating the temperature and humidity levels. Your wine cellar should generally stay at around 58 degrees year-round and maintain a constant humidity rate of approximately 70 percent. To achieve this, you will need to install air-impermeable insulation like expanding spray foam (open- and closed-cell) panels.. Furthermore, an incredibly air-tight building envelope for your wine cellar will enhance the energy efficiency of the cooling system that you choose for your wine cellar. Fortunately for homeowners in the San Francisco Bay area, our humidity levels are generally constant throughout the year to maintain an optimum residual humidity level.

The Top 3 Perks of Adding a Wine Cellar to Your Home

For people who love wine, the advantage of building a wine cellar is pretty self-evident: it gives you a place to store your constantly-growing collection of wine. However, there are a few other benefits to adding a wine cellar to your custom Conrado home, including:

• A wine cellar can protect your wine from vibrations: One problem with storing wine in your refrigerator is that every time you (or someone else in your family) open the refrigerator door, you may be causing vibrations that ruin the quality of your wine. Red wines are known to “throw sediment” as they age; even tiny vibrations can disturb the sediment and eventually diminish the wine’s quality. This is especially important if you plan to store or age your wine for several years.
• A wine cellar offers a perfect place to organize your collection: Staying organized is hard to do, and it is even harder with bottles of wine that multiply after every trip away from home. If you enjoy collecting vintage wines, a wine cellar can give you a perfect place to store those wines in a structured and systematic organization. Instead of searching through your basement closet for that perfect vintage, a wine cellar makes it easy to store and find your wine when needed.
• A wine cellar is purposefully located in your home to create a perfect entertaining space: Lastly, a wine cellar can be deliberately located to form part of a home bar, an outdoor dining space, or some other special part of your home where you can entertain guests and easily show off your collection.

Why Conrado Home Builders is the Best Option for Building a Home Wine Cellar

There aren’t many custom home builders whose founder and executive chairman is also an award-winning winemaker. Since the early 1990s, Paul Conrado and Conrado Cellars have been making wine, planting vineyards on residential properties throughout the Silicon Valley foothills, and producing hundreds of regional and national award-winning wines. Helping our clients design and build the best wine cellars goes hand-in-hand with our passion for making wine.

When your hire Conrado Home Builders for your custom home build, you will not only be getting the accumulated experience and expertise of our building teams, but you will also benefit from a team that has in-depth knowledge and understanding of the world of wine. We know that a wine cellar can quickly become one of the home’s most cherished (and often-visited) areas. We can help you analyze the best way to situate a perfect wine cellar within your custom home estate. For clients interested in doing a luxury remodel of an existing home, we can also help you find the best place to create a wine cellar in your home. We recently helped our president install a new, walk-in wine cellar underneath a stairwell in her home.

Furthermore, our building teams have direct experience implementing the latest green building techniques, technologies, and practices. When we plan and build your home wine cellar, we can help you determine the best type of insulation, the most efficient cooling method, and the best building practices to reduce the energy consumption and the ecological footprint of that wine cellar. In some cases, we might recommend installing a ducted cooling system that brings the cool air into your wine cellar from the outside. In other types of setups, a ductless system, which takes the air inside the wine cellar, runs it through an air exchange, and cools that air, might also be used.

We have decades of experience helping homeowners in Saratoga, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno, Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley, Woodside, and Atherton create near zero carbon neutral homes. Contact us today to find out how we can help you design and build the best home for you and your family.