It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. And right now I’m in between.

About two years ago we decided to build a wine cellar in our house. I spent a lot of time with my wife choosing the various designs for the cellar, the tiles, the paint, the racking, the custom made door (ordered from Mexico), etc. When the cellar was done it was magnificent. Everyone that sees it is impressed. It looks like you are walking into a cave in Bordeaux. The months of construction and work had paid off, or so I thought.

With the cellar done, I had to get to work filling the cellar. I made weekly trips to the wine stores near my home. The stores had lots of choices of great wine, so I bought a lot. Having a cellar also made buying us gifts much easier. People gave us wine (some of it GREAT wine). When I had about 300 bottles filling the cellar, I noticed that some of the wine was at its peak! One-third of the wine to be more accurate. When I was buying I did not pay attention to planning the wine in the cellar. Most wine is meant to be drunk within a year or so of when it is bought. I bought too quickly and too much wine that was not meant to cellar, which is about 90% of all wine. Needless to say, my wife and I are a great hit at parties and with my relatives since we now bring great bottles that are ready to drink when we visit. I’m now working on a better plan to fill the cellar with wines that will peak over the next several decades.

Several months ago, I finally got some measurement gadgets installed and operating in the cellar correctly. I’m using a wifi-based sensor to measure the temperature and humidity in the cellar. Since my cellar was in our basement, and our house has very thick plaster walls, it took me a while to work out how to use wifi repeaters to get a strong enough signal to the cellar to get a consistent read of the temperature and humidity. Imagine my shock when I confirmed that the cellar is not humid enough for a wine cellar. It was operating around 30-40% relative humidity. Check out www.cellarcentral.com to see the sensors and service I use.

Since several people, an architect, a builder, and a wine cellar expert (or so I thought) were involved in the development and building of the cellar, it was easy for everyone to point the finger at the others. In frustration and desperation to have a correctly functioning cellar, I decided to rip out the existing cooling system and have another expert install a new system. With the new experts help, we’re now operating between 50-60% relative humidity. The previous expert claimed to be “confused” as to why the system didn’t work correctly. At least the good wine I have will be well kept with the current swing in humidity.

My current worry is that the humidity should not be swinging over 10 percentage points. I suspect that all the weeks of planning a sealed room for the wine cellar have failed and the room is not sealed correctly. Right now I’m in between the best and worst of times, since I’m not sure if I will have to rip out the walls and start again with the different method for sealing the room.

My mistake in creating the wine cellar was to over think what I was doing. I involved an architect, a builder, someone who sells wine racking and cooling equipment. The architect rarely designed wine cellar–I believe mine was the first–but that was okay with me, since I thought the wine expert would provide the right details. The cellar is quite aesthetically pleasing. The builder rarely constructs wine cellars, so we agonized vapor barriers, etc. Bottom line, humidity is not something most builders deal with appropriately. They are more worried about mold than maintaining humidity. Lastly, the wine expert was really just a wine racking salesman and carefully isolated himself and the company from any responsibility. I should have hired one person who had done nothing but build wine cellars–turns out there is one person like that in the entire Philadelphia metro area. That person is helping me recover from the worst of times.

There is a silver lining. I do have a cellar and I have several hundred bottles (on my way to a couple thousand) of wine. Someday the cellar will be perfect. Until then, you should invite my wife and I to dinner. We’re bound to bring a terrific bottle of wine with us. For example, we brought a 1963 port to dinner at a BYOB get together with the local wine school.