Wine Cellar & Rack Capacity Calculator (Bottles, Weight, Cooling & Years of Stock)

How it works

individual racking: columns = width ÷ pitch, rows = height ÷ pitch (pitch: Bordeaux 9.5 cm, Burgundy/Champagne 10.5, magnum 12.5) · diamond bins ≈ 13 bottles per 45 cm bin · cases: 52 cm wide × 36 cm high per 12-bottle case · weight ≈ 1.3 kg per bottle · cooling ≈ 30 W per m³ of insulated cellar

Wine racking is a packing problem set by the bottle: a standard Bordeaux bottle sits in a slot on roughly a nine-and-a-half-centimetre grid, wider Burgundy and Champagne shapes need more, and magnums need dedicated slots, so the count a wall holds follows from its width and height divided by the pitch for the mix of shapes stored. Denser styles trade access for capacity — double-deep slots, diamond bins for whole cases, or case storage on shelves — and because a bottle weighs well over a kilogram, a full wall is a serious load. Matching capacity to the rate the cellar grows tells how long it will serve, and the room's volume sizes the cooling that keeps the wine's ageing slow and even.

Worked example

A 240 × 200 cm wall of single-depth individual slots at a 10 cm average pitch (60% Bordeaux, 35% Burgundy, 5% magnums) holds 24 columns × 20 rows = 480 bottles weighing about 655 kg. Drinking 3 a week (156 a year) but buying only 8 a month (96) shrinks the cellar by 60 bottles a year, so a full wall lasts about eight years without extra buying and holds three years of drinking; a 12 m³ cellar around it needs roughly a 360 W (1,230 BTU/h) cooling unit.

Frequently asked questions