Small Space Design: Vertical Wine Racks

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Small Space Design: Vertical Wine Racks

Staff Writer · Oct 28, 2009

When kitchen or home designers are scouring a room or living space looking for space saving options, vertical wine racks can be part of a greater solution for opening up a room and freeing up an area for optimal use of its square footage. For those who see themselves as wine collectors or aficionados who want to look at all of the different options for wine storage, it’s a good idea to think about how a vertical wine rack might fit into a small space design for wine storage.

Use of Vertical Wine Racks

A wine storage component that’s built vertically works on the same principle as any kind of similar storage unit, like a vertical CD holder. Instead of expanding out horizontally, the vertical wine rack will climb toward the ceiling, where users have the capacity to store many bottles on top of each other.

When you’re looking at these kinds of wine storage options, there are a lot of different designs. There are closed sided and open sided vertical racks. Closed sided racks may be built of wood or metal, or combination of materials, where the major part of the bottle is encased in an enclosed area. Other kinds of open sided racks feature light metal constructions where thin strands of steel or alloy keep bottles in place. One consideration with open sided vertical racks is that they may leave bottles vulnerable to sliding or falling, so when looking at these kinds of designs, it’s a good idea to do some simple tests to make sure your bottles will be well supported. One positive aspect of open sided racks is that bottles are more clearly visible, and some wine collectors use these kinds of rack designs to display labels. The open sided designs also tend to be more portable.

Storing Bottles Horizontally

For anyone who’s new to wine storage, it’s critical to distinguish between a vertical wine rack that holds bottles horizontally, and a DIY solution that, impractically built, may end up ruining the various vintages stored in it.

Basically, all wine collectors should know that traditional wines should not ever be stored vertically. The problem with vertical storage of bottles is that over time, without any of the wine contacting the interior and of the cork, the cork will dry out and shrink, allowing some air into the bottle. In this event, the wine will be ruined. Wine collectors looking at space saving options in their home need to find ways to house their bottles that don’t include changing a horizontal storage design. Even a diagonal design can be dangerous for some wines.

With this in mind, many of today’s wines use a modern non-wood cork, where bottles can be stored vertically with no damage to the wine. If a wine collector can distinguish between these new and traditional bottling methods, they may be able to create a new collection where bottles can be stored diagonally or vertically.

All of the above are things to consider when looking at saving space with vertical wine racks.

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