If you own a pub or restaurant, you might want to stock your own wines to ensure that you never run out of it. One of the best decisions you can make in such a position is to invest in a wine cellar. Such cellars allow you to stock the wine in a manner that will be appealing to your customers, and where it will last for a long time as well. In addition to that, it’s also important to note that it can help you save a lot of space.
When you have to store your wine bottles in the bar, you might need to dedicate a lot of space for this particularly if you have a large collection. With a cellar, however, you only need to put a few bottles on display, and then put the rest in the cellar. Another potential benefit of doing this is that it may reduce the risk of damage to most of the wine bottles. In case of issues such as an altercation in the bar, only the bottles on display will be destroyed.
It’s therefore very clear that having a wine cellar is an excellent idea. However, one thing you have to sort out when you are thinking of getting one is the safety angle. There are many things that can go wrong when it comes to safety in the cellar. Fortunately, these can all be avoided by a little forward thinking. Some of the measures you might need to put in place to keep the wine cellars safe include:
Proper layout
A common reason why some cellars are unsafe is because they are not laid out properly. When you are designing yours, you need to come up with a plan, ideally with a professional who has designed wine cellars before. Some of the things that should be thought of in the plan include making it easy to walk along the wine racks, particularly if you are going to store a large number of wine bottles.
You should also ensure that the racks are not too closely packed. In case one gets toppled over, it could have a domino effect on the rest, and you may lose a large portion of your wine collection because of one simple mistake.
Get sturdy racks
Another safety precaution you should consider is the investment in wine racks that are strong enough to hold the weight of the number of bottles of wine you have. This is particularly important since it reduces the chances of the racks giving way, leading to breakage of some of the wine bottles. Remember that when some people walk through the cellar, they might not think that there are shards of glass on the floor as a result of this phenomenon, and for this reason may end up being injured.
This calls for more attention to detail when you are shopping for the wine racks. You can even order them to be custom made, so that you don’t have to worry about quality issues. The other way of handling it would be by buying the racks from trusted sources.
Get the necessary safety devices
You will need to invest in a number of safety devices for the cellar depending on its nature. For instance, if you also store your gas cylinders in the cellar, you might want to get a detector that will initiate an alarm in case a leak is detected. This way, the risk of a fire due to the presence of such a leak will be mitigated.
Maintenance of the equipment in the facility
In most cellars, there will be other items such as a boiler for the restaurant. How well-maintained these are will also determine how safe the cellar is. To this end, you should aim to keep them well maintained, and upgrade them when you need to.
An example of when failure to do this leads to accidents is if you have a boiler that has an electrical fault. It might cause a spark, and if there is any spillage from any of the wine bottles the entire cellar could catch fire. Such fires can be difficult to control since you may not know that it’s happening until it’s very late. In addition to that, the presence of a large quantity of flammable material in the basement could also lead to this as well.
In summary, if you run a cellar or are thinking of getting one, you should be very keen on issues to do with the safety of the facility. The above are just a few guidelines regarding what you need to do to keep it safe. If you work with a high quality contractor, they will definitely give you more tips regarding this. Remember that in addition to keeping you safe, doing all the above pointers will also protect your investment.
