Wine Country Homes and Wine Storage

The appellations themselves are federal facts. Napa Valley, Sonoma Valley, Dry Creek Valley, Los Carneros, Livermore Valley and the Santa Cruz Mountains are each an American Viticultural Area defined in Title 27 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 9 — sections 9.23, 9.29, 9.64, 9.32, 9.46 and 9.31 respectively. The houses inside those boundaries share a brief that the boundary does not spell out: they are built for a household that collects, pours and hosts, often on a working or former agricultural parcel, and often with a view that the plan is bent to serve.

The housing stock is varied. The Napa Valley floor from Carneros up through Yountville, Oakville and Rutherford to St. Helena and Calistoga carries ranch houses and farmhouses from the mid-twentieth century beside recent estate homes; the hillsides toward Howell Mountain and along the Silverado Trail carry modern houses perched among oak and manzanita. Sonoma County runs from the Russian River bench lands and the Westside Road and Dry Creek corridors near Healdsburg to the Valley of the Moon estates around Glen Ellen and Kenwood, and south to the plaza-centred town of Sonoma. Livermore Valley’s wine-country homes sit east of the Bay on larger lots in a hot interior climate; the Santa Cruz Mountains put houses among redwoods on steep, shaded parcels with fog on one side of the ridge and sun on the other.

What these houses share is a program rather than a style. There is a great room or a kitchen that opens to a terrace, because the climate invites eating outdoors for much of the year. There is a place for the collection — a conditioned room, a glass wall off the dining room, or a converted pantry — and the house is arranged so that the collection can be reached from where guests are. There is often a second, working kitchen or scullery so the room guests see stays clean. And there is a tasting counter somewhere, with the glassware stored near it, because pouring is how these households entertain.

The house forms recur often enough to name. The farmhouse — a gabled main block with a porch and a kitchen that opens straight onto it — wants painted or lightly stained cabinetry with visible frames and a scullery behind the main room. The barn-form modern house — a long gabled volume with glazed ends and exposed structure — wants flat-panel cabinetry in white oak or walnut that reads as furniture under a tall ceiling, and a wine room that is a glass box inside the volume rather than a room off it. The hillside modern house — a stepped plan following the slope — often has the one room on the property that can be cut into the earth, and that room is where the passive-storage question becomes real. Each form sets the vocabulary; the program is the same in all three.

That program is what this guide is about. The five articles beneath it each take one decision a wine-country owner has to make — whether the house can store wine passively or must condition a room; how the racking is sized to the bottles actually collected; which species and finishes survive cellar humidity; how the estate kitchen is scaled and divided; and how tasting-room millwork is brought home — and ground each decision in a primary document rather than in a showroom’s opinion.

A cooling-unit manufacturer, Breezaire, publishes the conditions it designs for: desired cellar conditions are generally around 55 degrees Fahrenheit and 50 to 75 percent relative humidity. Our own journal guide describes the same target more narrowly as the mid-50s Fahrenheit with 60 to 70 percent humidity, which sits inside that band. Consistency matters as much as the number — the daily swing of a hot, dry wine-country summer day into a cool night is what a passive room above grade cannot absorb.

The same manufacturer’s build guide sets out what the envelope must do before a unit can hold those conditions: a vapour barrier on all walls, floors and ceilings, installed on the warm side of the insulation; a minimum of R-11 insulation in interior walls and floors and R-19 in exterior walls and ceilings; doors of minimum size, insulated to R-11 and weather-stripped; and no glass doors or windows in its load calculations. Concrete and brick, it notes, are neither insulation nor moisture barriers. Where a glass wall is wanted — and in wine-country houses it often is — the glazing is insulated, the seals are specified, and the cooling load is calculated for it by the conditioning contractor rather than assumed.

The reason the envelope matters to a cabinetmaker is the table below. The Forest Products Laboratory tabulates the moisture content wood reaches in equilibrium with a given temperature and relative humidity, and at 50 degrees Fahrenheit the cellar band runs from about 9.5 percent at 50 percent humidity to 14.8 percent at 75 percent. The Wood Handbook recommends an average of 8 percent for interior woodwork in most of the United States and 11 percent for damp, warm coastal areas. A conditioned wine room is wetter than either. Every piece of wood inside the envelope will take on that moisture, and it has to be designed and finished for it.

Read the full article: Passive vs Conditioned Wine Rooms.

The Forest Products Laboratory publishes both measures. Its dimensional-change coefficients, for the 6 to 14 percent moisture range, put old-growth redwood at 0.00120 radial and 0.00205 tangential, western redcedar at 0.00111 and 0.00234, true mahogany at 0.00172 and 0.00238, black walnut at 0.00190 and 0.00274, and commercial white oak at 0.00180 and 0.00365 — with commercial red oak at 0.00158 and 0.00369. Its heartwood decay-resistance grouping lists western redcedar, old-growth redwood, the white oaks, black walnut and American mahogany as resistant; young-growth redwood is moderately resistant.

Those two lists explain the traditional choices. Redwood and cedar are the racking species because they are the calmest and most decay-resistant softwoods on the table; mahogany and walnut are chosen where the racking is on display because they are both stable and handsome, and the Wood Handbook notes that American mahogany has excellent dimensional stability and takes an excellent polish; white oak carries structural and display elements because it is both strong and resistant. Red oak, which appears nowhere in the resistant columns, is the common kitchen species to leave outside the envelope.

Finish is the other half. The Wood Handbook is clear that no coating is impermeable to water vapour and that a coating cannot change the equilibrium moisture content wood will eventually reach — it only slows the exchange. Inside a sealed room with a cooling unit cycling, a finish must also not contribute odour, because the room is closed and the corks breathe. The species-and-finish article sets out which finish systems are used in conditioned rooms and which are kept out, and why unfinished redwood racking remains a defensible choice.

Read the full article: Species and Finish in Conditioned Rooms.

A tasting counter is a bar counter with different proportions: it is planned for standing and leaning as much as sitting, it carries bottle rests and a length of open surface for pouring, and it has glassware and a small refrigerated drawer behind it rather than a full bar’s inventory. The back bar is the display — open shelving or glass-fronted cabinetry for the bottles currently being poured, lit from above with the low-heat LED sources our journal guide describes, and backed with the paneling that gives the room its character.

Paneling is where architectural millwork earns its place. A tasting room at home is often a corner of a great room or a wall of the dining room rather than a separate space, and the paneling — flat panels in a modern house, stile-and-rail in a farmhouse, book-matched veneer in a contemporary one — is what defines it as a room within a room. The same vocabulary carries into the wine room itself, where panelled walls and ceilings in a resistant species are the finish that most distinguishes a crafted cellar from a lined closet.

The article on tasting-room millwork at home goes through counter geometry, stemware storage that actually fits the glasses, and the paneling details, and the architectural millwork service page describes how PineWood builds panelled rooms in general.

Read the full article: Tasting-Room Millwork at Home.

The county and valley pages are Sonoma County and Napa Valley, with town pages for Healdsburg, Glen Ellen, Kenwood and Sonoma, and further pages for St. Helena, Calistoga, Livermore and Los Gatos on the Santa Cruz Mountains side.

The wine-room service itself is described on the Wine Rooms page, with regional pages for Sonoma County wine rooms, Napa Valley wine rooms and Healdsburg wine rooms. Panelled rooms, tasting counters and back bars fall under Architectural Millwork; the estate kitchen itself under Custom Kitchens.

The design-led companion to this guide is our journal article Luxury Wine Room Design: The Complete Guide, which covers glass enclosures, lighting and placement. The engineering of the cabinet itself — joinery, wood movement and finish chemistry — is in Cabinet Construction & Joinery.