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Whether you build a custom cellar or buy wine storage cabinets, you have to decide on your home wine storage capacity. Keep in mind that there’s a difference between what you need and what you may want to have available. Determining factors for what you need include:

1. Your rate of consumption (including last minute dinner parties)
2. The breadth of your wine interests. How much variety do you want to be able to select from?
3. The frequency and ease of restocking (either from off-site storage or new purchases)

My cellar as an example

My wife and I drink wine often and frequently have friends over or take bottles to restaurants (which is easy in San Francisco). I like experimenting and would always prefer to open 6 different wines for an event instead of 6 bottles of the same wine. Most of my wine is stored at Vinfolio’s warehouse so it’s easy to bring more home. Considering these factors, my home cellar probably only needs to be a few hundred bottles and I know I could easily live within that limit (in reality, it holds up to 800 bottles).

The role of off-site wine storage

Most wine collectors get hooked on buying and tend to exceed the capacity of their home storage sooner or later. That’s when off-site storage is useful to capture the “overflow.” As an aside, Vinfolio has some customers who have moved in the past year and have decided to downscale the space allocated to their home cellar because of the ease of having wine delivered frequently from our wine storage facility.

Bottom line: The home wine storage capacity you need is totally unrelated to the total size of your wine collection.

BusinessWeek.com has an interesting article called “Sophisticated cellars” posted on November 22, 2006 with an attractive online slide show of some beautiful wine cellars by a number of well known cellar designers (including their price tags). While all wine cellars should deliver the same basic function of protecting your wine collection in ideal climatic conditions, the sky’s the limit on the potential cost of creating one.

As cellar designer Paul Wyatt comments in the article, cellars are “a specific symbol of power, of success.” The cellar’s role as a status symbol has no doubt driven a meaningful part of the 35% annual growth in the industry for the past five years. According to Jim Deckebach, the founder of Wine Cellar Innovations, the custom cellar industry now generates $500 million in sales annually.

For some great ideas of what can be done, I recommend getting Wine Cellars: An Exploration of Stylish Storage.