A wine cellar is a major investment, and one which you need to protect as much as possible. Remember that by the time you have the cellar in place, you are likely to have spent a lot of time and money on it. Having to lose even a fraction of the wine in the cellar can translate to a huge loss, particularly if you are a serious collector.
To this end, you should ensure that the wine cellar design that you go for should incorporate some security features to keep your investment safe. Most people tend to ignore this aspect of wine cellar design, and often to their own detriment. Some of the things you should especially look out for when designing the cellars to make them safer include:
Limiting access to the facility
If you are going to stock up on some of the most exotic bottles of wine in the cellar, you definitely don’t want everyone to have access to it. To this end, you might need to consider installing some technologies that will limit the number of people who have access to it. One that comes to mind is a biometric lock that uses parameters such as finger prints and iris patterns to grant access to the facility.
The major benefit of such locks is that they are very specific; it’s difficult for anyone to create a lock that can bypass them. In addition to that, they have also become much cheaper in the recent past, mainly owing to the fact that they are now mass produced. You therefore don’t need to spend a small fortune to get a high end lock for the cellar.
In addition to that, you can also restrict entry into the facility by putting in place some policies. For instance, if you have the cellar in a restaurant, you can make it a rule that only a select number of individuals will be allowed access to the cellar. This has several effects. For one, it makes it easier for people to be accountable for what goes on in the cellar, and this reduces the risk of loss of some of your stock.
Getting proper doors and locks
If you have a cellar that has some of the most coveted wines in the world, you can be sure that a few people will be motivated to try and break into it. This is especially so if the cellar inventory is in the public domain, such as when it’s published in blogs and in newspapers. To prevent such an event, you will need to get heavy duty doors and locks that can resist attempts at breakage better than other types of locks.
One idea that you can adopt is to get iron clad doors. These are doors that have a solid frame reinforced by steel or iron. They are usually finished in wood, so that it becomes difficult for anyone to tell that they have an iron core. Breaking into such doors is usually very difficult, and most people often need a lot of time and specialized equipment to do so.
Surveillance
In addition to that, you can also invest in some surveillance technology for the cellar. One of the concerns that many people have is that nothing much ever happens in a cellar, so recording every single minute of it might not be wise. One way to go round this is by investing in a system that is activated by motion or heat. This comprises a number of CCTV cameras that are off by default.
However, when the system detects some activity in the cellar, the cameras are then activated, and they start recording the activity in the cellar. In addition to making more sense, this also makes it easier to use the system. If you need to retrieve the recordings, you would not need to go through hours and hours of nothing happening in order to get the footage that you are interested in.
Alarm systems
In addition to that, you could also invest in integrated alarm systems for the cellar as well. An integrated alarm system is one that is triggered by anything that could represent a risk to the wine. Rather than sending out an alarm in response to only one trigger, you could set it up so that it can sound the alarm when multiple things go wrong. For instance, you could get one that is sensitive to motion, heat, smoke and unauthorized entry through a door or window.
The next time you are thinking of doing cellar design, you should keep the above in mind. It will go a long way in ensuring that you can keep the cellar safe from any theft. In addition to giving you peace of mind, putting these measures in place will also help minimize the cost of insuring the cellar.
