by Chris Coonce-Ewing


It's january and while I've got a heat shield to keep my boil going when I brew outside it's a little cold for me. So I thought I'd do a little work indoors and add some needed storage space to my wine cellar.

I've searched online for cheap wine racks and never found something that I liked. One person suggested using PVC pipe cut to length but that is neither cheap or effective. I bottle wine in 3 sizes: 325ml, 750ml and 1.5L. Most of the bottling is 750ml but I've got some of the other sizes. A one size rack wasn't going to work. I need to be able to fit multiple sizes of bottles.

While looking through a catalog recently I found wine racks but to hold 30 bottles was $40-$60 and I just couldn't bring myself to do that. So... using some simple 1x10 pine plank, screws and wood glue I'll build my own that holds 40 750ml bottles but can still accomodate the other sizes.

Based upon what I saw in the catalog I would need 14 linear feet of 1x10 plank. I got this in two pieces, 8' and 6'. The 8' plank I cut into 4 2' sections. Here is how I arranged them.

The next step was to predrill screw holes, add glue between the boards and screw them together. Nothing fancy here. Basic wood glue, basic screws. You could even screw the boards together by hand but using a drill with a screwdriver bit is soooooo much easier. Here is my screwed and glued box:

Measuring the inside diagonals of the box I needed two lengths of 32" each. These were cut. To make an X from them they need to be notched in the middle to allow them to fit flush in the box. In the middle of each board I cut a 3/4" wide notch 4 5/8" deep. This allows the two boards to lock together and fit into the box like this:

You could at this point stain, paint, varnish, etc the wine rack. I've chosen to at this point just let it be natural. I don't have leaking bottles or water rushing across the floor so I'm really not worried about the wood rotting away. In the time it takes for that to happen I will have most likely outgrown this wine cellar and have built new racks anyway.

The last step now is to add bottles to it. In this picture I've got 750ml 325ml and 1.5L bottles in the rack and they all fit fine. This size rack will hold 40 750ml bottles. Being a simple box you can stack racks on top of each other.

The only problem I have now is that I've got more rack capacity than I have bottles of wine. I guess the only solution is to start making more wine!