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Product Description
Finally, the most informative, fully illustrated, step-by-step guide to designing and building your own home wine cellar! This beautifully photographed and illustrated full-color book covers all of the details of locating and preparing the right construction area. It includes the latest designs, as well as up-to-date racking and organization styles and techniques. Perhaps most important, this book addresses all the thorny challenges of temperature and humidity control--just where most home wine cellars fail. Having a wine cellar is a hot trend among homeowners, and contractors throughout the country are including them in new construction. This copiously illustrated "hammer and nails" book is by far the best DIY guide available.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book is not much use to anyone looking for solid information on how best to construct a wine cellar. It spends time talking about the "fundamentals of wine storage", something that anyone looking to construct a cellar of his own will probably already know. It is a mystery why some sectiions on improving drainage and exterior wall construction are there at all.
There are chapters on self-contained wine appliances, and on acquiring, managing and enjoying wine, all of which are largely irrelevant to the serious constructor. Some pointers on the construction and use of wine racking are useful, though, and the section on vapour barriers and types of insulation are useful in a general way.
All in all, this is a rather general text that does not do what is says in the title: it is not a complete guide.
There are chapters on self-contained wine appliances, and on acquiring, managing and enjoying wine, all of which are largely irrelevant to the serious constructor. Some pointers on the construction and use of wine racking are useful, though, and the section on vapour barriers and types of insulation are useful in a general way.
All in all, this is a rather general text that does not do what is says in the title: it is not a complete guide.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
8 reviews
62 of 64 people found the following review helpful
Beautiful, useful, book. Only two complaints...
18 Aug 2005
Format:Hardcover
This a beautiful, useful book well worth the purchase price. But I bought it to tell me how to build a home wine cellar (which it does) and I was disappointed to discover that it doesn't include any actual floor plan examples, with dimensions, showing a sample layout of a real wine cellar for, say, a small collection, a medium collection or a large collection of bottles. I'm new to this and need suggestions from someone who has done a lot of this. That's what I bought the book for. Also, I would have appreciated some recommendations on brands of cooling equipment and maybe a few names, websites, etc. of different equipment and furnishings the author has found superior to the competition. An appendix listing equipment and furnishing suppliers would have been great, like a recommendation of a good set of prefab racks to buy. In other words, I've read the whole book and still have to design my own floorplan from scratch and still have to spend a lot of time researching websites to decide on the brand/model of cooling equipment I want to use. I suspect the author already knows which is best, and I wish he had told me!
31 of 31 people found the following review helpful
Not really a "Complete Guide"
12 Oct 2006
Format:Hardcover
Parts of the book were helpful and the photos were interesting. However, aside from asthetics, the critical issues in building a cellar are the vapor barrier, insulation and cooling system. It would have been helpful to have more technical advice or at least technical advice that was easier to follow. For example, an explanation of why the vapor barrier must be on the outside everywhere (to keep condensation away from the insulation) would be more helpful than just a bald statement that it should be. The diagrams are clear as far as they go, but the explanation on how to put a vapor barrier up and insulate a ceiling is confusing in the absence of an explanation of the purpose of the vapor barrier. For example, if you have wires, pipes and ventilation ducts in your basement ceiling as most people do, what is the best approach? Should you drop the ceiling and then install a vapor barrier followed by insulation or is there something else you can do? Likewise, a discussion of the pros and cons of using a glass vs. solid door, whether to have electrical outlets inside and if so how many and why, whether to place the light switch inside the room or out, and a discussion of how to properly ventilate the cooling unit to optimize operational efficiency all would have been helpful. Finally, since the author is in the business, I would assume that he uses particular brands of cooling units and has specific recommenations regarding size, makes and models--all of that would have been useful information.
To be fair, I did a lot of research and nobody seems to be able to write clearly on this subject and there is a lot of conflicting information on various aspects of design and construction. Still, now that I've been through the construction process, it seems that someone with expertise should be able to write a sufficiently detailed publication to give a novice or a novice working with a general contractor who isn't a wine cellar pro an understanding of the critical elements of design and construction to help them anticipate the issues involved in building a cellar. The book falls short in that regard.
I agree with the reviewer above that this book could have been half as long. As someone who was already inclined to build a cellar, I was already familiar enough with wine to know how to serve it. I wasn't looking for a contractor's advice on that subject. What I was looking for was detailed information on planning/design issues and construction methods. The information in this book that I found helpful on those topics was less than complete and was limited to about a dozen pages.
To be fair, I did a lot of research and nobody seems to be able to write clearly on this subject and there is a lot of conflicting information on various aspects of design and construction. Still, now that I've been through the construction process, it seems that someone with expertise should be able to write a sufficiently detailed publication to give a novice or a novice working with a general contractor who isn't a wine cellar pro an understanding of the critical elements of design and construction to help them anticipate the issues involved in building a cellar. The book falls short in that regard.
I agree with the reviewer above that this book could have been half as long. As someone who was already inclined to build a cellar, I was already familiar enough with wine to know how to serve it. I wasn't looking for a contractor's advice on that subject. What I was looking for was detailed information on planning/design issues and construction methods. The information in this book that I found helpful on those topics was less than complete and was limited to about a dozen pages.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
About a quarter of what I needed
8 Aug 2006
Format:Hardcover
This is a pretty book. It has nice pictures of some very pretty cellars. From a practical standpoint though, only about 25% of it is actually worthwhile. They should offer a scaled down version at at quarter of the price.
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