apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

HOLY TRAPDOOR WINE CELLAR BATMAN!!

I wish I even HAD a basement. *sigh* I keep my wine in the living room in:
1. a combo slate console table/wine rack
and
2. a combo removable tray table/wine & glass rack

The kitchen gets too hot/greasy for wine in our house. (yes, I know... get a hood) Not possible, unfortunately.

We have a small wine fridge in our kitchen for important bottles that we are saving, and then a wine cabinet/rack in the dining room for every day bottles. The cabinet tends to usually be empty for some strange reason though! ;)

There's something creepy about this photo. I imagine there are bodies lining the other shelves we can't see in the picture.

My bottles of red are on their sides in an upper cabinet in the kitchen...
...and the bottles of bubbly are in the refrigerator.

my wine shop guys have suggested that the best place to store wine is on the floor of an interior closet, because they usually stay pretty cool. I, however, keep mine in a rack in the back stairwell, where it is also pretty cool.

We have a 30 bottle wine fridge for our cabs and pinots. Everything else (random whites, zins and blends) go in my daughter's closet on a metal wine rack I picked up from Cost Plus a few years ago.

Ours are stored under our stairs. It's not absolutely ideal, but it's the best we can do whilst we're renting. My dream is to own somewhere on sufficiently high ground that we can dig out our own basement/cellar (not many places in Melbourne have them for some reason), just like one of our friends has done.

For now though, each bottle that's worth aging gets wrapped in newspaper and then replaced in the cardboard box that they came in - this apparently insulates against any sudden temperature changes, which I've been told is what's bad for wine (some have expected cellaring dates of up to 15-20yrs, so it's worth taking some care). Each box is numbered, as is each 'position' within the box, and we have a spreadsheet listing which wine is where. It seems nerdy, but the spreadsheet got put together when we got to eighty bottles and had to go through pretty much every single one to find the particular one we were after one night. The spreadsheet also reminds us to drink bottles before they're past their best - getting good wine, cellaring it, and then opening it too late to discover vinegar is just too upsetting to think about! We're now up to about 200, which fit into a remarkably small space when stacked in the boxes.

Everyday wine is on a series of open wooden wine racks courtesy of IKEA - anything we'll be drinking within the year isn't worth wrapping up and looking after.

We picked up a few retired card catalogs from a local library and use them as our living room coffee tables. Each drawer fits one bottle of wine perfectly! I'll eventually get around to labeling each drawer for easy reference. The drawers are also great for storing other odds and ends like nail polish, tools, bookmarks, candles, etc.

You guessed it -- I'm a librarian. :-)

Unfortunately, I think IKEA discontinued them, but their VURM wine racks are incredible for a postage stamp sized apartment.