Tasting-Room Millwork at Home

A winery tasting room is organised so that one host can pour for many guests without turning away from them. The counter is between host and guest; the bottles and the glasses are behind the host within reach; the wall behind that is the display, and the lighting falls on labels rather than on faces. Everything else — the volume of the room, the number of stations, the retail shelving — is commercial and does not transfer.

At home the same arrangement serves a household pouring for a dinner party or a weekend of guests. The counter becomes a seated bar, a standing counter or a run of the kitchen island; the back bar becomes a lit shelf of the bottles currently open; the glassware moves into millwork beside the counter rather than into the scullery; the wall becomes paneling. The wine room itself — the conditioned envelope with the racking inside it — sits behind or beside all of this, and the companion articles on passive versus conditioned rooms and on species and finish cover it. This article is about the millwork outside the envelope.

That distinction matters, because the millwork outside the envelope lives at ordinary interior conditions. The Wood Handbook recommends an average moisture content of 8 percent for interior woodwork, furniture and trim in most of the United States, with individual pieces between 6 and 10. A tasting counter and back bar are built to that, in whatever species the house wants; the shorter list of cellar species applies only once the vapour barrier is crossed.

Waterloo Container lists its W5 Bordeaux 750 ml at 11.437 inches tall, its W137 Burgundy 750 ml at 11.625 inches, its W13 hock 750 ml at 13 inches, and its W26 Bordeaux 1.5-litre magnum at 13 inches. A standing-bottle shelf that clears the Bordeaux by a comfortable margin may not clear the hock or the magnum at all, so a back bar with one fixed shelf height is a back bar that will one day have a bottle lying on its side. Shelves are either set with the tallest format in mind or made adjustable; the display tier is often given one taller bay for large formats.

Base widths set the spacing: 3.015 inches for the Bordeaux, 3.213 for the Burgundy, 4 inches for the magnum. A shelf of standing bottles, spaced to be seen individually rather than packed, takes fewer than a shelf-length divided by a bottle width would suggest, and the companion article on rack geometry makes the same point about the racking inside the room. A back bar is not storage; it holds the bottles being poured this week and the few worth looking at, and the rest live in the conditioned room.

Lighting is the back bar’s second job. Our journal guide’s rule is to keep heat and ultraviolet away from the wine and to use low-heat LED sources — accent lighting that grazes the shelving and subtle label illumination. Lighting is routed in the millwork before it leaves the workshop: channels in the shelf undersides, a drop for the driver, a switch leg to where the house wants it. The glass-fronted version of the back bar — doors with mullions or a single clear light — turns it into a cabinet that reads as furniture, which is often what a dining room wants.

Architectural millwork — the panelled wall, the cased opening, the ceiling treatment — is the difference between a bar cabinet placed against a wall and a tasting room that happens to share a floor with the dining table. A panelled wall behind the back bar frames it; a cased opening or a change of ceiling height marks where the tasting area begins; a run of wainscot carries the line around the corner. The vocabulary follows the house: flat panels with reveals in a modern house, stile-and-rail with a bolection mould in a farmhouse, book-matched veneer in a contemporary one.

The same paneling carries into the wine room itself, where it changes species. Outside the envelope the panelled wall is whatever the house is — painted poplar, white oak, walnut — at the Wood Handbook’s interior moisture content. Inside the envelope, where the room holds wood at roughly 9.5 to 14.8 percent moisture by the handbook’s equilibrium table, the panelling is in a resistant species such as mahogany or quartersawn white oak, built as veneered panels over a stable core so that the face is the species and the movement is the core’s. The two walls can be detailed identically and read as one; they are not built from the same material.

PineWood builds panelled rooms as a matter of course — it is the architectural millwork service, and the ceilings, stacked mouldings and panelled walls are the detail work the shop is known for. A tasting room at home is that service applied to one wall and one counter: designed with the kitchen and the wine room as a single piece of work, built in the Rocklin workshop, finished and cured there, and installed by our own crews.