We Make Wooden Wine Racks In Our Woodshop

by Rosehill Blog | Aug 11, 2021 | ALL POSTS, wine racking

Here at Rosehill Wine Cellars, we make all types of wooden wine racks in our modern woodshop behind our Mississauga showroom. Our facility is equipped with every machine and tool required to make wine cellar visions come to life. Our skilled staff is comprised of sawyers and cabinetmakers who use a variety of advanced wood processing machinery to complete breathtaking custom woodworking projects.

We’ve made it our mission in life to be Canada’s best wooden wine rack producer and to be ranked among our nation’s most imaginative wine cellar designers. Because we’ve been in the wine cellar construction industry since the 1990’s, we know which designs, materials and cooling equipment are most efficient, and when it comes to racking, we’ve got the means to build anything you can imagine, on time and on budget.

Sawyer examines output from the Weinig Variomat crown moulding machine.

Highly Motivated Workers Are Rosehill’s Secret Weapon

Eight industrial woodworking technicians, both male and female, work within our wine cellar production centre, and we pride ourselves in the longevity of our work force. Much of our staff has been with us for over a decade, learning new skills and becoming more knowledgeable and experienced every day.

Each staff member has different abilities which they’ve brought to our team or have developed here in our shop. We strive to work with everyone individually to ensure we’re leveraging their best skills. Since our plant produces custom work, every job is a little different, and each order brings fresh challenges and new learnings.

Our woodshop processes approximately 3500 board feet of top-quality hardwood per month. Most of the wood we use is grown domestically and that includes oak, maple, walnut, birch, and cherry. Certain exotic lumbers are imported, like mahogany and sapele.  Other necessary supplies include white birch plywood, rolls of hardwood veneer edging, hinges, handles, panes of glass, boxes of screws and buckets of varnish and wood glue. In addition to everything else, we also use about 4lbs of pure Canadian beeswax each month. (Save the Bees!)

Hardwood enters our shop as raw timber, unstained and untreated but kiln-dried and perfectly cured so it won’t shrink after it becomes furniture. The boards are moved to our storage area where they’re sorted and wait to be selected. The handlers here are the youngest, and strongest team members and they start each day by ripping planks to the correct specs.

Wine cellar design schematics streamline production and are shared between specialists.

Every assignment comes in the form of detailed blueprints with a specific pick list and the correct order in which things need to be completed. This process ensures we stay on schedule. We also create predesigned kit racking which is also custom built to order. The advantage of having a versatile team is that individual roles can change at a moment’s notice without delaying production.

How Wooden Wine Racks Are Made

Wooden wine racks are conceived on paper with each part itemized. The resulting schematic follows the job around the shop where it serves as a handy list of parts and to illustrate more complex assemblies. Junior staff members start the process when they choose the raw timber from which to fabricate parts. Their work passes to more senior staff who require wooden components be precisely cut and shaped.

Inside our facility are specialized wood saws which not only cut high quality timber, they also reduce time and effort. It’s no secret that our professional equipment makes woodworking easier, more precise, and safer than if we were operating consumer-grade tools available in hardware stores. As an example, one table saw in our shop has eight blades and can rip a single plank into seven strips in one pass. The machine uses lasers to check the edges and will auto-report any calibration requirements.

Eight blades for a table saw that rips wooden planks into thin strips for wooden wine racks.

Next stop for most woods being used is a station where we smooth rough surfaces and carve the required grooves. Our Weinig Variomat whirls five cutting edges at once and outputs flawless crown moulding.

Our wood shop also has an Opticut S-50 which cuts upwards from underneath the wood. This device lets operators dial-in the exact specifications they require, and then that same operation can then be performed indefinitely. That’s a real time saver when building wine racks or anything that requires lots of duplicate pieces like our Premier Cru wood wine racking kits.

The programmable Opticut s-50 saw is a real time saver for cutting similar pieces in custom wine cellar designs.

Another programmable tool is our Honig CNC machine which was imported from Germany. The computer-controlled mechanism improves production time, quality, and consistency as well as material yield. Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining is a manufacturing process which employs pre-programmed computer software to dictate how the cutting mechanisms move and we use it when we want to complete a large custom wine cellar with many uniform parts. We also have regular table saws as well as a band saw, an edge sander, a drum sander, a wood lathe, and a side bore drill.

Worker uses table saw to rip thin strips of black walnut for decorative elements in wine cellar racking.

Once the rough lumber has been planed, routed, and shaped to the required parameters, the pieces advance to the assembly phase. Nail-gunners with perfect eyesight and steady hands take up the arm-numbing task of binding the bits together.

Worker uses nail gun to bind six inch bits of wood into a decorative cover for a wine cellar cooling duct.

In the photo above, a worker uses a nail-gun to shoot slender bits of metal into a delicate grill which, in this case, will be used as a custom duct cover.

In the assembly phase, our most senior cabinetmakers with years of experience follow the same detailed plans to fasten all the wooden parts and pieces together as wall cabinets and wine racks.

A cabinetmaker with forty years of experience assembles wooden pieces into a wall unit for an upscale custom wine cellar.

Finally, there are finishing touches which include staining, lacquering, and waxing certain woods.

Spraying wood with a protective lacquer in the well-ventilated spray booth inside Rosehill’s woodshop.

A spray booth station with all the requisite barriers and ventilation is among the most recent additions to Rosehill’s woodshop. As an environmentally conscious organization we only use biodegradable water-based finishes. Before we had our own spray booth, the work was sent across town to a 3rd party vendor, but now it’s all done in-house which gives us more control over the quality and timeline.

Finally, the finished product moves to the Shipping Department.

Another load of wooden wine racks waits for pickup in the Shipping Department of the woodshop.

Here are wooden wine racks waiting to be packaged so they can be picked up or shipped out and assembled in a new wine cellar somewhere near or far. The racking we make is installed in homes, cottages, and restaurants all over North America. We are extremely proud of the cellars we produce, and it shows in the quality of the craftsmanship.