Help! Advice on wine storage without a cellar, please?
Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 9:21 am
We are about to move into a house in Normandy (great cider, Calvados and cheese but no local wine ), which has no cellar, and I would appreciate advice.
My present thinking is that I should convert part of a single story outbuilding for the purpose of storing my roughly 1000 bottles of wine. It is about 10 metres long and 3 metres wide divided into two rooms with an open gap between them. There are a couple of windows, parts of the roof need repair and there is ventilation from a gap between the roof and the wall right round the building.
My plan would be to partition one of the rooms, stop up most of the ventilation gap there except for a small aperture to the north, cover the window, create a ceiling with insulating material and insulate thickly the walls (including the partition) on all four sides, but not forgetting to place an insulated door in the partition.
The Norman climate is similar to that in SE England and Belgium, i.e. damp and mild most of the time, liable to marked temperature fluctuations, with very hot spells of 32°C+ (90°F) max in some summers, e.g. 2003 and this year, and occasional days below -10°C (+14°F) in the winter.
Does anyone here have a view whether such a conversion would be likely to be effective for wine keeping purpose without the addition of expensive air conditioning?
The alternative would be the buy 3 or 4 large capacity wine fridges but we then run into the problem of finding space for them in a not very big house (some 180m2 = roughly 1800 square feet), which, to boot, is constantly warmed by central heating most of the year. The outbuilding could be used for them, of course, but subject to temperature extremes without my insulation plan.
An aggravating circumstance to any solution involving electricity is its proneness in France to weather induced cuts due to most of the local grid’s being above ground, unlike in the UK and Belgium.
My present thinking is that I should convert part of a single story outbuilding for the purpose of storing my roughly 1000 bottles of wine. It is about 10 metres long and 3 metres wide divided into two rooms with an open gap between them. There are a couple of windows, parts of the roof need repair and there is ventilation from a gap between the roof and the wall right round the building.
My plan would be to partition one of the rooms, stop up most of the ventilation gap there except for a small aperture to the north, cover the window, create a ceiling with insulating material and insulate thickly the walls (including the partition) on all four sides, but not forgetting to place an insulated door in the partition.
The Norman climate is similar to that in SE England and Belgium, i.e. damp and mild most of the time, liable to marked temperature fluctuations, with very hot spells of 32°C+ (90°F) max in some summers, e.g. 2003 and this year, and occasional days below -10°C (+14°F) in the winter.
Does anyone here have a view whether such a conversion would be likely to be effective for wine keeping purpose without the addition of expensive air conditioning?
The alternative would be the buy 3 or 4 large capacity wine fridges but we then run into the problem of finding space for them in a not very big house (some 180m2 = roughly 1800 square feet), which, to boot, is constantly warmed by central heating most of the year. The outbuilding could be used for them, of course, but subject to temperature extremes without my insulation plan.
An aggravating circumstance to any solution involving electricity is its proneness in France to weather induced cuts due to most of the local grid’s being above ground, unlike in the UK and Belgium.