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When you are passionate about wine you begin collecting it and when you begin collecting it you need a place to store it.

A closet can easily be turned into a mini wine cellar to store your growing wine collection.

Before you construct your wine cellar consider the position of the closet in relation to the rest of the house.

Avoid converting a closet against an outside wall into a wine cellar. The outside walls of your house or apartment can be subject to wide fluctuations in temperature. Choose an internal closet where your wine can be stored in a more stable atmosphere.

The degree and the speed of the temperature change are critical to successfully storing and aging wine. A gradual change of a few degrees between summer and winter won't matter. The same change each day will harm your wines by ageing them too rapidly.

The most important rule when storing wine is to avoid large temperature changes or fluctuations. You'll notice damage of this nature straight away from the sticky deposit that often forms around the capsule. Over time the continual expansion and contraction of the wine will damage the integrity of the cork. It's like having the cork pulled in and out again every day. When this happens, minute quantities of wine may be pushed out along the edge of the cork (between the cork and the bottle neck) allowing air to seep back in. Once the air is in contact with your wine the irreversible process of oxidation begins and your wine is ruined.

At 55 to 58F the wine will age properly, enabling it to fully develop. Higher temperatures will age wine more rapidly and cooler temperatures will slow down the ageing process. Irreversible damage will be done if your wine is kept at a temperature above 82F for even a month.

The most difficult part of converting a closet to a wine cellar can be finding other places to store the original contents of the closet! Be ruthless ... sell / give away / move all the present contents and start with a blank slate!

Purchase some inexpensive wine racks from a hardware store, online retailer or storage shop and you'll have a simple but very effective mini wine cellar.

Wine rack designs will vary in bottle density; Price variations are more to do with aesthetics than efficiency.

Individual racking is the most convenient for selecting bottles. If you have racks against only one wall of the closet you may still have floor or shelf space available for wines that you purchase by the case.

Chris Miley makes it easy to build your own wine cellar. Discover the secrets to wine cellaring success at http://www.winecellarsecrets.com and for more information on mini wine cellars visit http://www.miniwinecellarsite.com