Finally, the most informative, fully illustrated, step-by-step guide to designing and building your own home wine cellar! This beautifully photographed and illustrated full-color book covers all of the details of locating and preparing the right construction area. It includes the latest designs, as well as up-to-date racking and organization styles and techniques. Perhaps most important, this book addresses all the thorny challenges of temperature and humidity control—just where most home wine cellars fail. Having a wine cellar is a hot trend among homeowners, and contractors throughout the country are including them in new construction. This copiously illustrated “hammer and nails” book is by far the best DIY guide available.
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From Publishers Weekly
"Every bottle of wine—regardless of its vintage or variety—deserves proper storage and care," says Sims, a California carpenter specializing in wine cellar construction. This unique book promises to explain how to make that proper care happen, in seven illustrated chapters covering everything from wine racking solutions and the fundamentals of wine storage to planning and building a wine cellar and opening, straining and serving old bottles. There’s something here for every wine lover, whether he or she is interested in using a self-contained storage unit (built-in or stand-alone) or intent on constructing a walk-in, below-grade wine cellar. Detailed sketches portray the components of a subterranean basement foundation, the steps involved in installing French drains, and other aspects of construction; photographs show finished cellars. Although this is chiefly a book for DIY-ers, casual wine enthusiasts may also enjoy perusing its pages.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Perry Sims lives in El Dorado Hills, California.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
61 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, useful, book. Only two complaints...,
By
This review is from: Home Wine Cellar (Hardcover)
This a beautiful, useful book well worth the purchase price. But I bought it to tell me how to build a home wine cellar (which it does) and I was disappointed to discover that it doesn't include any actual floor plan examples, with dimensions, showing a sample layout of a real wine cellar for, say, a small collection, a medium collection or a large collection of bottles. I'm new to this and need suggestions from someone who has done a lot of this. That's what I bought the book for. Also, I would have appreciated some recommendations on brands of cooling equipment and maybe a few names, websites, etc. of different equipment and furnishings the author has found superior to the competition. An appendix listing equipment and furnishing suppliers would have been great, like a recommendation of a good set of prefab racks to buy. In other words, I've read the whole book and still have to design my own floorplan from scratch and still have to spend a lot of time researching websites to decide on the brand/model of cooling equipment I want to use. I suspect the author already knows which is best, and I wish he had told me!
31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not really a "Complete Guide",
By
This review is from: Home Wine Cellar (Hardcover)
Parts of the book were helpful and the photos were interesting. However, aside from asthetics, the critical issues in building a cellar are the vapor barrier, insulation and cooling system. It would have been helpful to have more technical advice or at least technical advice that was easier to follow. For example, an explanation of why the vapor barrier must be on the outside everywhere (to keep condensation away from the insulation) would be more helpful than just a bald statement that it should be. The diagrams are clear as far as they go, but the explanation on how to put a vapor barrier up and insulate a ceiling is confusing in the absence of an explanation of the purpose of the vapor barrier. For example, if you have wires, pipes and ventilation ducts in your basement ceiling as most people do, what is the best approach? Should you drop the ceiling and then install a vapor barrier followed by insulation or is there something else you can do? Likewise, a discussion of the pros and cons of using a glass vs. solid door, whether to have electrical outlets inside and if so how many and why, whether to place the light switch inside the room or out, and a discussion of how to properly ventilate the cooling unit to optimize operational efficiency all would have been helpful. Finally, since the author is in the business, I would assume that he uses particular brands of cooling units and has specific recommenations regarding size, makes and models--all of that would have been useful information.
To be fair, I did a lot of research and nobody seems to be able to write clearly on this subject and there is a lot of conflicting information on various aspects of design and construction. Still, now that I've been through the construction process, it seems that someone with expertise should be able to write a sufficiently detailed publication to give a novice or a novice working with a general contractor who isn't a wine cellar pro an understanding of the critical elements of design and construction to help them anticipate the issues involved in building a cellar. The book falls short in that regard. I agree with the reviewer above that this book could have been half as long. As someone who was already inclined to build a cellar, I was already familiar enough with wine to know how to serve it. I wasn't looking for a contractor's advice on that subject. What I was looking for was detailed information on planning/design issues and construction methods. The information in this book that I found helpful on those topics was less than complete and was limited to about a dozen pages.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
About a quarter of what I needed,
By
This review is from: Home Wine Cellar (Hardcover)
This is a pretty book. It has nice pictures of some very pretty cellars. From a practical standpoint though, only about 25% of it is actually worthwhile. They should offer a scaled down version at at quarter of the price.
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