Wine storage in small apartment?

I feel sure this has been covered before but my search results were fruitless.

My wife and I just moved to a barely 900sqft townhouse here in Maryland. At the same time we have discovered that we really like wine making. I understand that most wines need to age in the bottle for months or years to reach peak flavor. Our home is so small that we simply don't have a good dark space that is temp controlled to store more than maybe 30-50 bottles of wine (that sounds like a lot but really only works out to about 2 full runs of wine). I looked at temp controlled self storage places but the cheapest I found was $45/month and I can't justify $500+/yr just to store bottles of wine.

I know I'm not the first person to run into this problem. Does anyone have any suggestions for me as far as bottle storage? So far we've found spaces to stash the carboys so that isn't as much of a problem but I have no idea where I'm going to stash all these bottles of wine I'll soon have.

Thanks in advance.

Forget controlling the temperature and just put it anywhere you can. Bottles of wine are heavy and take up a lot of space. I've used shelves, wine racks, boxes, drawers, and plastic totes. If you like wine and make 10-15 gallons or more a year you'll soon have wine coming out your ears and no place to store it. I like to keep wine in carboys for at least a year. It's much easier to store that way.

You may store dessert wines at my house.

KTHXBAI!

One place you could tuck away a bunch of wine is under you bed. You could buy some the inexpensive platic boxes with snapp lids that are shallow enough to slide under you bed so they are out of the way but easily retrievable.

summersolstice said:

Forget controlling the temperature and just put it anywhere you can. Bottles of wine are heavy and take up a lot of space. I've used shelves, wine racks, boxes, drawers, and plastic totes. If you like wine and make 10-15 gallons or more a year you'll soon have wine coming out your ears and no place to store it. I like to keep wine in carboys for at least a year. It's much easier to store that way.

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Nice cellar!

jezter6 said:

You may store dessert wines at my house.

KTHXBAI!

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I've got a Chocolate Raspberry Port coming next month. If I run out of space I'll keep you in mind

Texron said:

One place you could tuck away a bunch of wine is under you bed. You could buy some the inexpensive platic boxes with snapp lids that are shallow enough to slide under you bed so they are out of the way but easily retrievable.

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I hadn't thought of this but it makes sense. Thanks!

I keep mine in a closet.
Make some 2' x 2' boxes with an "X" across them and you can get 36 - 40 bottles in each one. I have 2 and will be making a third soon.

They sit under the hanging clothes section of the closet that is normally reserved for stacks and stacks of womens shoes. Those go elsewhere, gotta have your priorities right!.

DoctorCAD said:

I keep mine in a closet.
Make some 2' x 2' boxes with an "X" across them and you can get 36 - 40 bottles in each one. I have 2 and will be making a third soon.

They sit under the hanging clothes section of the closet that is normally reserved for stacks and stacks of womens shoes. Those go elsewhere, gotta have your priorities right!.

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I can try this in my closet. I often feel that my wife's shoe collection rivals that of Imelda Marcos.

Anyone know how to build a spiral wine cellar by any chance?

I had never heard of a sprial wine cellar so I looked it up.

Awesome.

I'm going to be doing some research on these to see what it would take to build yourself.

A lot of money at a guess, haha.

It may sound silly, and no doubt if i ever put the idea forward to my girlfriend she would dismiss it right away, but could you possibly feature it on a wall in your appartment (should there be room)? Parhaps buy a few large wine racks and secure them to the wall?

I think it would look pretty cool and make a pretty good talking point.

Dicky

Yeah...from the looks of it, unless you happen to have a tall house that you can build a circular shaft in, you'll need to excavate a circular shaft and line it with concrete--basically a well. If you can't do that, I think a better idea is to just give up one of the interior walls in your house and build a wine wall.

huesmann said:

Yeah...from the looks of it, unless you happen to have a tall house that you can build a circular shaft in, you'll need to excavate a circular shaft and line it with concrete--basically a well. If you can't do that, I think a better idea is to just give up one of the interior walls in your house and build a wine wall.

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Yea, they are actually meant to be built underground and use the earth to assist with keeping the temperature just right. A wine wall isn't a bad idea though, I like that.

I am considering just doing mine in my half basement, or possibly even under a shed outside. It was suggested to me to possibly use industrial drainpipe as the outer wall. Building shelves is easy enough, I think the spiral staircase would be the only real engineering challenge. Even still not that hard to build. Might not all be to code though so making it as hidden as possible may be beneficial. Still researching right now.

Unless that shed had HVAC, that would be a bad idea.

ETA: as far as using industrial drainpipe as the wall, it could work, but you'd need to overbore your hole, fit the pipe, the fill the outside space with some kind of slurry, probably grout.