Wine Rooms: An Alternative to a Custom Wine Cellar

For people who don’t want to do a complete make-over of their basements or a section of their home in order to build a custom wine cellar, a great option is the wine room. These storage units provide everything the home wine connoisseur needs to age and store wine.

Though a wine enthusiast can put racks up just about anywhere, you can ruin a lot of good wine if you don’t store it with the proper temperature and humidity control. Most basements aren’t 100 percent underground. That foot or so can be the factor that will ruin the kind of controlled temperature you want to have for wine storage. The solution is a separate area that not only provides racking, but also temperature and humidity control as well as proper lighting.

American Wine Essentials, Inc. in Milpitas, California, at the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay, offers wine room packages. “We offer the best cost per bottle for getting a walk-in versus a pre-built cabinet or even building a room from scratch,” says Andrew Winn, partner. In business since 1998, American Wine Essentials has seen growth in personal wine collections. “New people getting into wine has increased each year,” Winn says. “We have older folks who are the true wine connoisseurs. But there has been a lot of new money and a lot of new people just getting into wine.”