building a wine rack

I made this simple wine rack a few weeks ago to house my apple cider. A large amount of cider gets made every year by my friend and I, and considering I usually don't drink it all before the following years cider is ready, I need a place for it to store properly. The property we live on just happens to have an old root cellar thats perfect for storing wine and cider... and beer, and cheese, and root crops, which I plan on storing all of those things in this cellar. Right now the cellar needs to be fixed up before its used for certain things but that will be detailed in another post.

The rack is made entirely of 2x3's because they are dirt cheap and I'm dirt poor. The frame is 2x3's cut to size to make a box that is 2 feet deep, 4 feet wide, and 6 feet tall. No fancy joint work here, just screws. Most wine bottles are about a foot tall so this way Ill be able to load bottles from both sides and the necks from most bottles will not be protruding.

The vertical posts and are just 2x3's ripped in half. Most wine bottles are about 3 inches wide so I spaced the posts about 3 1/2 inches apart so bottles will easily fit in between. Any farther and your bottles will probably risk falling through their supports. The supports of the bottles are just 3/4" x 3/4" x 2 feet strips of wood glued and nailed to the vertical posts. The run front to back so the cider or wine can slide in or out easily.

 The horizontal strips are spaced about 3 1/2 inches apart vertically so that the bottoms of one row don't hit the tops of another row of bottles. Cutting, ripping, gluing, and nailing these 3/4 inch pieces was incredibly tedious.

The finished homemade wine rack, although very basic, is pretty impressive with bottles of cider loaded up. I think I spent maybe 40 bucks at the most building this. Now all my cider and any other type of wine I make has a place it can be laid down properly. The temperatures in my cellar now that its spring (and the door is always open because of the work I'm doing on it) are around 55 degrees. I'm expecting the cellar to get into the 60's in the summer. Much better than bottles roasting in a 90 degree house. This last picture shows the wine rack inside the wine cellar. The candles just make it awesome.