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When you are passionate about wine you start to collect it … and when you begin collecting it you need a place to store it.

A closet can easily be turned into a mini wine cellar to store your growing wine collection.

Before you begin converting your closet into a wine cellar consider the position of the closet relative to the rest of the house.

You should not convert a closet against an outside wall into a wine cellar. The outer walls of your house or apartment can frequently be subject to wide fluctuations in temperature. Select an internal closet where your wine can be stored in a stable atmosphere.

The degree and the speed of the temperature change are critical to successfully storing and aging wine. A gradual change of a few degrees from winter to summer won’t cause damage to your wine. The same change each day will harm your wines by ageing them too rapidly.

The major rule when in wine storage is to avoid wide fluctuations in temperature. You’ll be aware of this damage straight away from the sticky deposit that often forms around the capsule. Over time the continual expansion and contraction of the wine will damage the integrity of the cork. It’s just like having the cork removed and replaced every day. When this occurs, tiny quantities of wine can be pushed out along the edge of the cork (between the cork and the bottle neck) allowing air to seep back in. Your wine will be ruined once air comes in contact with your wine and the irreversible process of oxidation begins.

At 55º to 58ºF the wine will age properly, enabling it to fully develop. Higher temperatures will age wine more rapidly and cooler temperatures will slow down the ageing process. The damage done to your wine will be irreversible if it is stored at a temperature above 82ºF for even a month.

The most difficult part of creating a wine cellar in a closet can be finding other places to store the original contents of the closet! Be ruthless … remove all the present contents (give away / auction / move them) and start with an empty closet!

Buy inexpensive wine racks from a hardware store, online retailer or storage shop and you’ll have an easy and very effective mini wine cellar.

Wine rack designs vary in bottle density; price variations have more to do with appearance than efficiency.

Individual racking makes it easy to select bottles. If you have racks against only one wall of the closet you may still have floor or shelf space available for wines that you purchase by the case.