#HTECheers! 12 Solutions for Organizing Wine
Lots of people with wine bottles don’t want or need a fancy wine cellar; they’re just looking for some sort of rack to keep their wine bottles organized. (Hopefully, if the wine is good, they will keep that rack in a place with a fairly constant moderate temperature.)
The Winebowl, designed for Mogg by Cory Grosser, is an eye-catching piece—but it’s also a reasonably practical way to hold 10 bottles. It’s made of cedar and has a metal ballast.
Some end users will prefer a modular solution that can expand (or contract) as the size of their collection changes. The Noè bottle holder from Alessi, designed by Giulio Iacchetti, comes in sets of six modules; each module can be connected to others by using a groove located along the base.
Multiple sets can be combined, as long as the overall height doesn’t go over 1 meter (about 39 inches). The rack is made of thermoplastic resin.
The WineStack from Lonc comes as a set of three flat sheets which can then be folded into three triangles that interconnect to create a pyramid. (They can also be used to create a row holding five bottles rather than four.) Having something that can collapse into almost no space when not in use would be handy for end users who expect their wine collections to both grow and shrink.
And with more sets the rack can expand to hold more bottles. The WineStack is made of galvanized steel.
The Infinity from Kartell, designed by Ron Arad, comes with 16 pieces that slide together to form the rings of the rack. Purchasers say the Infinity racks are easy to assemble, and some call them “Lego for wine.” The pieces are made of polypropylene.
A single set can be create a rack with rows, or one shaped like a pyramid. But they can also be stacked quite high to meet the needs of end users with more substantial collections (and thus the name Infinity). Since I live in earthquake territory, I’d be nervous about going too high unless the rack could be secured in some way, as it may be with the under-the-stairs design shown by Hostore.
WineHive is a product that is somewhat similar in appearance to the Infinity, except it’s made from satin-anodized aluminum. To play it safe, the creator (John Paulick) originally limited the height to just four levels, but later found it could go higher. WineHive was successfully launched on Kickstarter about four years ago. However, over the years, Paulick discovered ways he thought the design could be improved.
With WineHive 2, which is an active Kickstarter until May 6, Paulick has made two design changes. First, to avoid sagging problems, WineHive 2 uses rigid hexagons instead of multiple pieces that get assembled into the hexagons.
And to avoid sliding problems, Paulick has replaced the adhesive locking tab (which sometimes lost its adhesive) with a steel set screw.
Grape comes from Goods; it was designed by Robert Bronwasser. Each rack holds 12 bottles; they can be stacked, and they can also be wall-mounted. (Made sells a wall mounting kit.) However, there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for locking multiple racks together, so this design might be more precarious than some others.
Grape stores bottles with a maximum diameter of 9 cm; it fits most champagne bottles, unlike many other racks. (And why don’t they all specify what size bottle they accommodate?) The rack is made from EPP foam.
Numerous wine racks are designed specifically for wall mounting. The Cioso wine rack from Blomus holds bottles with necks that fit in its 1.25 inch opening.
But see how straight those bottles are? When you look at photos from purchasers, the bottles aren’t perfectly parallel like that. (However, purchasers are generally happy with the rack.) Because the bottles must extend out on both sides of the rack, the Cioso takes more wall space than some other designs.
Some users would be hugely irritated by bottles not hanging in perfect alignment, and they might be happier with a rack such as the one from Cyan Design, where the rack cradles each bottle.
The Climb wine rack from D-Italy, designed by Francesco Sette, has a neck-holding design I’ve never seen before. Climb was specifically designed for Bordeaux-style bottles—and not champagne bottles. It’s made from solid oak. Again, end users who want the bottles perfectly aligned will not want this rack.
Another way to design a wall-mounted wine rack is to provide pockets that the bottles slip into, as with the Mr. Butler wine rack from Amorin Cork Composites. This rack doesn’t look all that sturdy, but Amorin says it holds up yo 25 kg (about 55 pounds). One disadvantage of this type of rack is that the labels are mostly hidden.
One other wall-mounted wine rack style has the bottles mounted perpendicular to the wall, rather than parallel with it. This style requires more careful placement, given how the bottles extend into the room, and how easy if would be for people to hit their heads one of them.
The Esigo 6 aluminum wine rack has another drawback; if the wine rack isn’t full, the end user winds up having empty holes in the aluminum panel, which isn’t the nicest of looks. (The Winebowl, on the other hand, looks nice with empty holes.)
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