temperature?

While it is certainly better to store wine in a cool area if you keep it away from vibration and sunlight that is still a good thing. Keep it as low to the ground as possible. (That is usually the cooler part of a house since heat rises.) Your closet may still be a good option.

Storing wine at too high a temperature ages it more quickly so it will just be ready to drink quicker. They do make inexpensive wine storage refrigerators. If you are talking storage in the low to mid 70 F range I doubt it would be worth it unless you really decide to get into this in a big way.

I realize the space is not air conditioned, but I really don't know what the temperature swings are in your apartment. If it gets hot in the evening you could just store your blankets and such over the wine to insulate it from the swings in temperature. Slow swings in temperature are better that quick ones.

My wines are stored in an area that goes from about 45 to 68 F over the course of a year. It's not optimal but I have had wines stored this way up to 8 years that were just fine. Hope that helps.

Joe

me wrote:

This prompts me to ask if anyone has done much with the whole evaporative cooling idea, using the pot-in-pot method? As I understand it, you can take a big terracotta pot, put a smaller terracotta pot inside of it, and fill the space between the pots with wet sand. You keep the sand wet, and it causes the pot-in-pot to behave like a refrigerator, cooling the inner pot and whatever it contains.

Where I live, in the Southeastern U.S., our humidity levels tend to be high enough that evaporative cooling (at least for air conditioning purposes) is not expected to work efficiently, but I wonder if for purposes of cooling bulk-aging wines or cultured foods (like sauerkraut and kimchee), this method might not be useful. I read somewhere that dewpoint is a more reliable indicator of cooling efficiency, and that above about 50 efficiency is reduced. (Our dewpoints here lately have been about 56%; I use ForecastFox in Firefox, and you can set it up to regularly monitor items like this.)

Anyone have any thoughts on this method for refrigerative purposes?

Diane

Diane, Dewpoint and RH are interrelated, dewpoint is the point where RH reaches 100 %.

Evaporative cooling will work better at low humidity, that is correct. Inside your house the RH will be low if the house is air conditioned. The cooling coil pulls a lot of the moisture out of the house.

I can't imagine this being a good idea in a house, it takes a lot of care and feeding. You would be blowing a lot of moisture around unless you figured out a way to seal the unit up. You do need good air flow for it to be effective.

If you have a cheap thermometer you can tie a string to the end, wrap some a layer of paper towel around the bulb and attach it with a rubber band or string. If you twirl it on the string you will see the effect at the existing conditions. It can really drop in temperature. (You would have just made a sling psychrometer, it's a tool used to measure RH.)

If the room was 77 F anfd the RH was 90%, the temperature drop would be about 3 degrees;

at 77 F and 70% RH, 9 degrees;

at 77 F and 50% RH, about 15 degrees or 63 F.

This assume perfect coupling which you can get on the thermometer, the pot in a pot would be tougher. I don't understand where the air flow comes from in the pot it pot. I'm not saying it won't work, just that I can't see it doing much unless exposed to air flow.

Joe

Joe, thanks for the advice and the thermometer tip. I was thinking of blowing a fan on the pot-in-pot, but if that results in a lot of moisture, that might make things too uncomfortable. Unless it somehow would help the heat pump operate more efficiently (I understand nothing about the mechanics of it all). The whole pot-in-pot evaporative cooling idea is one that is used by poor people living in arid regions as a refrigeration method in the absence of electricity. I just thought it might have some use for homebrewing and food culturing.

Diane

It'd work to a certain extent if the outer pot was unsealed. Water would slowly seep through the wall.

Mike