If you are like most wine drinkers, you finally realized that you NEED a wine rack, and if you are reading this, then you are probably thinking about building your own.

You can build a wine rack out of just about any material strong enough to support the weight of the wine and you can build wine racks in a variety of shapes and sizes. The choice is yours...

On this page, we will discuss the initial planning of the wine rack, and factors you should consider before spending too much time setting up your design.

Wine Storage Factors - The three most important things that affect the proper storing of wine are light, temperature, and motion.

• Wine should be stored in a dark place because light (even fluorescent light) will react with the wine to cause off-flavors.
  
  
• The temperature of stored wine should be between 60 and 65 degrees.
  
  
• Wine should be left alone and not agitated during its aging, or storing process.

With these three principles of wine storage in mind, be sure to design your wine rack so that it will fit in an area that provides these important characteristics.

Bottle Orientation - Bottles of wine should be stored horizontally. The main purpose of this is to keep the corks moist so they do not dry out and allow air into the bottles. Oxygen in the air will react with the wine to oxidize it and create bad flavors, and in extreme cases, may turn your wine into vinegar.

With the emergence of screw top wines and synthetic corks, this my soon be a mute point - only time will tell.

Wine Bottle Stacking - There are 2 basic ways to design your wine rack, depending on how you plan to stack the wine bottles.

• Bulk Stacking - This is where you have a single shelf and you lay your wine bottles next to one another. When the shelf is full, you lay another layer of wine bottles on top of the first, and so on, creating several layers of bottles in sort of a pyramid fashion.
  
  
• Individual Stacking - This is where each bottle has its own specific space, not touching any other bottles.

Each method has advantages and disadvantages.

Bulk stacking wine racks are easier to build, use less material, and are more space efficient. However, the disadvantage is that it is much more difficult to sort through your wines to see the individual bottle labels. Only the bottles on the top row are accessible without moving the top layer around.

Individual stacking wine racks will take a bit more time to build, use more material, and take up more space, but the advantage is that every wine you have is easily accessible at any time. Wine racks designed in this way make it much easier to organize your wines by styles and leave spaces open for future additions.