How To Design A Wine Room

For wine lovers that love to entertain, a wine room is an essential part of their project. At Humphrey Munson we design and manufacture rooms of all shapes and sizes from a simple display in a dining room to ‘active’ wine rooms which are sealed and self contained using bespoke cooling systems.

Regardless of design, good quality wine is to be celebrated and storing it properly is vital when hoping to keep it for long periods of time.

It’s not something you generally think about but one of the many enemies of wine is vibration.

Vibration can disturb the sediment present in the bottle, but it also causes complex chemical reactions which are less visible. We recommend that you reduce or only allow minimal movement around the wine. A great place for wine for example is out of the way in a formal dining room or off the main kitchen in areas with less traffic in the home.

Light and temperature are another key thing to consider when thinking about installing a wine room. Sudden change in temperature can be very damaging to wine, so with this in mind it’s essential to keep the temperature stable at around 8°c-13°c if possible. As for light, wine should be kept out of direct sunlight.

A little moisture in the atmosphere is actually.a good thing. Humidity helps to stop the cork from drying out which then exposes the wine to oxygen. Be warned though, too much oxygen can damage cardboard, wooden cases and labels, and so the optimum level of humidity is 70%.

Mixing storage is a lovely way to break up the density in a wine room, so we love to incorporate individual bottle storage, x-frame wine storage, and open storage for cases.

The above example at the White House project is a great example of mixing the storage to create a beautiful wine wall but also the presentation area for wines you are planning to drink imminently.

Side note – you can’t store wine in the presentation area longterm (unless it is corkless) as the cork needs to stay in constant contact with the wine. If you don’t have space for a wine room, you can always incorporate an under-counter wine cooler which will hold around 4o-45 bottles, or a tall wine storage unit that will hold around 80 – 95 bottles depending on the brand. We will do a separate post on these options soon!