Moisture balance is just as important as temperature. Be sure to have a moisture barrier installed. No matter what the cellar's size, contents or geographical locale, think about your wine collection as an assemblage of living creatures, each with its own life cycle and role for your palate. There are various considerations taken in terms of humidity and temperature all around us. Consider the role of dessicants in the electronics industry, or ventilation in residential/commercial construction. Wine storage is a cross-disciplinary craft, so prep your walls, ceilings and floors in an isolated manner but in a way that allows flexibility. Allow the cooling system to vent to an adjacent room. If this is impossible, leave in contingency a route to outside of the building. (However, there's a correct way to have this built, depending on geographical location.) Mold is a bane, sunlight is an antagonist, improper ambient temperatures create uncertainty and vibration is just as unsettling to viniferous organisms as it is to vertebrates. We are wine geeks having fun.

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Most people who come to me realize that it's chiefly about location, location, location. The cellar needs to adhere to your lifestyle and wine storage goals. It can be - but isn't always - simpler to "retrofit" a room than to build one from scratch. Inspect the construction of the existing space. Avoid carpeting your cellar at all costs, as airborne molds can attack your corks and taint your wines, foiling your efforts and spoiling your dinners. Stick to the procedures for ventilation, and think about whether you'd like the cellar to be a place to gather or to experience wines. Seating or not. Large formats, 375s, display wines, long-term agers...all of these things contribute to how you tie a cellar in to existing architecture. Again, your wine preferences have everything to do with how the space is built. Trust me and hire me. Once I have your commitment (a deposit will be negotiated in order to secure my time and efforts), we'll get going with bar napkins, graph paper and CAD. Then a discount will apply to the actual build, which will FAR undercut what your interior designer will tell you, even after buying a bottle of O__ One, assuming this to create overnight wine expertise.

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If that cart's not broken, don't fix it. But get an analysis. A simple question-answer session with me may reveal surprising possibilities. Every wine cellar has the potential to perform more logically. This is simply because wines come and go, wine experimentation happens constantly and life goes on despite it all. Have me spend some time sprucing things up - shift some wines, relabel or relocate them, all according to what you and I collaboratively decide they should do for you. The results are often bewildering and always beneficial.

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