CHOOSE YOUR CATEGORY CELLAR

Great collector or wine lover, find your perfect wine cabinet according to your profile! Vin & Passion has selected the best brands on the market, to keep on hand or keep in the best conditions your finest wines.

Here are the main criteria to be taken into account to make the right choice:

What the main use do you want to do? Would you like to make your wines aging several years or keep your bottles at service temperature?

How many bottles do you want to keep? There are cellars from twenty bottles up to 500. A collection can grow quickly, so it is recommended to forecast quite big even if it is not totally filled. However, it must be filled to 50%, to ensure a perfect functioning.

Where will you place the wine cabinet? If you choose to put the wine cabinet in a living room, there are models with wood finish, as decorative as furniture. Built-in models can elegantly fit into your kitchen. This type of wine cabinet is characterized by the fact that they expel heat at the back. For free-standing cellars, heat is rejected from the back, like a refrigerator. In this case, provide a gap of around 10 centimeters around the wine cabinet to evacuate the heat.

What is your budget? There is a huge price range on the wine cabinet market. Finishing, design, quality, the budget will also depend of the value of the preserved bottles.

The major criterion for aging

If you are looking for a cellar to age your wines for several years, some technical criteria are taken into account.

• Uniformity of temperature: the ideal storage temperature must be constant and included between 10°C and 14°C.
• A suitable level of humidity: the respect of humidity conditions is an essential factor to preserve the elasticity and the sealing quality of the corks.
• Effective thermal insulation: good insulation prevents temperature fluctuations and reduces power consumption.
• A permanent ventilation system: the air quality and its continuous renewal are crucial to prevent odors that could be transmitted to the wine.
• A minimum of vibration: reduce vibration allows to respect the biochemical evolution process of the wine.

The difference between a wine cellar and a wine cooler

A wine cabinet is used to store and age the wine for several years by providing optimal guard conditions. It can generally maintain a large number of bottles. It maintains a constant and ideal temperature (about 12°C). If you want to keep a few bottles on hand for an improvised tasting, the 2 zones cellars allows to determine a guard zone and a service zone, settled according to your preferences.

A wine cooler is a device generally less expensive and intended to keep the wine at the ideal temperature for consumption. There may be two zones, one for white wines and one for red wines. These are not appliances dedicated to long term wine conservation because they do not have a compressor or anti-vibration system, essential for storing wines.

Glass door or solid door

One of the enemies of wine is light. Solid doors allow full and better insulation than glass door opacity. However, the glass doors of cellars are UV treated to minimize the effects of the lights. It is better not to expose the cellar directly to sunlight.