Wine storage in dining room wall

Sunset, March, 1985

Keeping wine handy but unobtrusive in a small dining room, this recessed rack borrows space from the utility room behind it. During evening meals, a small fluorescent bulb mounted behind a baffle softly illuminates a mirror on the rack's back wall. A cabinet below the bottle slots stores corkscrews and oversize bottles.

Designed by A.J. Callo of Sunnyvale, California, the rack has a 1/2-inch plywood shell that's 56 inches tall and 11-1/2 inches deep; it fits between twon nonstandard wall studs and extends about 7 inches into the utility room. Callo formed the grid for the bottles from cross-lapped pieces of 7-inch-wide, 1/4-inch-thick tempered hardboard.

For a polished look, Callo glued black plastic laminate to all exposed surfaces. To help insulate the wine from temperature variations in the utility room, he covered the exposed back section with 3-1/2-inch fiberglass batting.

To fit a rack like this between studs with standard 16-inch spacing, reduce the number of bottle slots from four to three across. This approach is suitable for short-term storage, but long exposure to light or temperature fluctuations can compromise the wine.