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Posted on September 27, 2016 @ 11:35:00 AM by Paul Meagher
A project I'm working on this week is to convert a section of my garage into a mini-winery space. This project is necessary because I hope to have some grapes to harvest in the next month and I want to have a space dedicated to fermenting and storing the wine under controlled conditions. There is a tradition of using a garages as a launch pad for ideas and businesses and I hope to honor that tradition in this series of blogs on my garage mini-winery.
There are three ambient conditions that I'm hoping to control in my mini-winery:
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Air Quality
The main variable I'm concerned with first is Temperature. There are three temperature zones that I want to control:
- The ambient winery room temperature.
- The red wine fermentation temperature.
- The white wine fermentation temperature.
In most of the wine making literature I've read, red and white wines are
supposed to be fermented at different temperatures. Whites around 13 C (55 F) and reds around 30 C (86 F).
My first objective, however is to better control the ambient winery room temperature and then I can differentiate into controlling fermentation zone temperatures.
To control the ambient temperature of the mini-winery I'm building a room into a section of my garage. Yesterday, me and my son installed an 8 ft. x 12 ft. insulated floor. I chose this particular size so I wouldn't waste any wood and because it was close to the room dimensions I want. The actual dimensions of the room will be 7 ft. x 12 ft. because I don't want a window in the winery room. This is what the project looks like right now.
My son helped me with the mini-winery project when he got home from football practice. We got two walls insulated/vapored and linoleum down.
I'm thinking of going with thin plywood on the wall. I want to be able to easily remove panels if I have to. This project does not involve messing with the existing electrical setup of the garage which is non-ideal but workable.
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