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Backup Wine Cellar Solution

Hello all. 5+ years ago I was an occasional poster and constant lurker on this NG, but 4 years in northern Ohio, the land of no wine drinkers, left my wine hobby/habit/obsession out in the cold. I now live in the Fresno area and have been happily pursuing my passion again. Being 1.5 hours from Paso Robles and 2-4 hours from many of the best California areas has been quite exhilarating. Paso Robles has been a real treat and a journey of discovery of some incredible wines I simply would have missed otherwise. There is some truly incredible "stuff" coming out of this area, and prices tend to be lower as the name just isn't as marketable yet. Lucky for me.

This new area though, leaves me with a real issue. Since I do not have a basement, as most CA houses do not, I now own a large Vinotemp, which fits nicely into a space in my dining room. I think it was a 550 unit, and has around 300 bottles in it currently. Bottles range from Bordeaux to Rhone to Down Under to CA mainly. Two things worry me about this set-up:

  1. Power outages - The temperatures during the summer in Fresno hit around
100F daily. I know with the wine mass in there, I have some time during an extended outage, but I'm not sure how long.

  1. Cooling Unit malfunction - This worries me the most. If the cooling unit dies, I have no clue what to do. The whole cooler sits about 6 inches from the wall, which leaves no room to service the unit and moving it would be impossible with 300+ bottles inside. Not to mention I have no idea if anyone could service it or if I would just have to replace the cooling unit - but I fear that is not a short process.

So, I'm looking for someone smarter than me out there who relies on a unit like I do - how are you prepared for the above situations? is there a simple way to repair a cooling unit? Do you keep a spare as backup? I can see having a 3rd party wine storage facility on backup, but I cant see how to get the wine there in an emergency. I have seriously thought about digging a cellar in my backyard, but it's not really feasible at the moment, and might be difficult anyways given the small-ish yard, housing covenants, and potential cost.

Just looking for some general feedback.

Thanks all and glad to see a lot of old familar names still posting here.

Dark Helmet (I'm still leary of using anything close to my real name on Usenet)

Reply to
Dark Helmet
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Forget about power cuts, it will take a long time for wine to go from 12C to

38C, (Specific heat etc)

I have two Liebherr wine units in my garage, they are at a constant 12C and humidity is also controlled. If one died and could not be repaired, I would still have time to get a replacement before any heat affect on the wines. they hold 250 bottles each.

JT

Reply to
JT

Probably not an issue in the short run but there's always the dry ice back-up when things go wrong for a long time as in a total mechanical failure. As an aside, I was involved in a wine distributorship in Ohio and sold a lot of wine in Northern Ohio especially in Toledo, Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown so perhaps you were either in a really small town or you didn't hook up with the right people but there are some really serious wine folks up there. Dr. Frank Komorowski of Bellevue has one of the largest private collections in America housed in a former bank building in Bellevue.

Reply to
Bi!!

You can get a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) which will provide current for a fairly long time, depending on the size and price of the unit. Aside from the fact these get expensive, they are quite noisy.

I don't know how long the power is likely to be our in your area, but most good units have a pretty good autonomy anyway.

I have a large Liebherr chest freezer that keeps food for 52 hours in case of a long blackout. I don't know what kind of autonomy you think you'll need, but this would be long enough to get a repair or some other solution in place. (Granted a wine cabinet is not the same thing, but...)

Welcome back to afw,

-E

Reply to
Emery Davis

Power outages are easy as we have this problem in southeastern Virginia and that is solved with a backup generator hooked to a propane tank. We have hurricanes so can be out of power as much as two weeks. Ours is hooked into the house's power supply. We have solar panels but I don't know how well they will fare in a hurricane. Broken cooling unit is a harder issue as there are few people other than refrigerator repair who will come out to fix it.

Reply to
Lawrence Leichtman

If the cooling unit fails you probably have a long time, if you don't open the door to the unit. After all, the temperature in your house won't be that high as long as you have electricity, right?

We had a power failure a few years ago, my power was out for almost exactly 24 hours. The temp in my fridge (kitchen one, not wine cellar) went up from 38 to, if I remember right, about 50 (this was over the summer). A wine cellar, with bottles taking up most of the space (as opposed to mostly air, in a regular fridge), would take a lot longer to warm up. I don't think that wine will be ruined if for a day or two it makes it to 70 degrees... after all, it was probably around that temp sitting in a store before you bought it.

Worst case, you crank your air conditioning down to 68 degrees and pay a higher electric bill for the month, or find a couple of free refrigerators on CraigsList...

Shaun Eli

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Reply to
Shaun Eli

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