Cedar Closet

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dcbrown73

Clueless Winemaker
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So I'm looking at buying a house and the house has a cedar closet in the basement. It's decent sized too. Everything tells me this is not a good place to store carboys due to the smell of cedar. If I can smell it, it could impart flavors on the wine I would suspect.

Thoughts?
 
Maybe I'm all wrong, but how would the cedar impart a taste to the wine if your carboys have an airlock in them? I assume you mean storing carboys for bulk aging. The purpose of the airlock is to keep outside air and nasties from getting into the wine, so............ if the cedar taste can get in, you have to have an airlock & potential contamination issue, no? I even store my empty carboys with pot. sulfite solution and a solid bung in them. So, assuming you keep the wine under functioning airlocks, I don't see how it could impart a cedar taste to the wine.
 
Even if the cedar did not make its way into the wine somehow one of the cardinal rules of wine tasting is to not be anywhere near anything with a strong odor that would overwhelm or mess up your sense of smell/taste. Seriously, I would pull it out or put all your sweaters and or anything you didn't want the Moths to eat in that room before I would turn it into a "winery" of sorts.
 
That makes some sense - it might not affect the wine as much as one's ability to properly sample it.
 
Laquer or clear enamel.
Home restoration companies gut and spray burn homes ( framing, rafters, underside of the roof, wiring , plumbing, everything) with laquer to seal smoke smell in, they use white so they can see it but clear would look good and be easy to keep clean.
 
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I would not worry about it. I would keep the carboys in there and not worry (the carboys are sealed). Once bottled, though, I would store it in a different place (for the reason Mike stated above).
 
Am I the only person in the world who finds the smell of cedar absolutely mouthwatering? I mean I burn wood to keep warm in the winter and this year my wood shed was lucky enough to have some cedar in it. Every time I went and got wood all I could think was "man, there has to be a way to get a hint of that cedar into an agreeable wine..."

Anyway. If you plan on doing tasting and testing in there, then the smell could be overwhelming. I would just slap a few layers of latex paint on the walls. It makes a pretty effective barrier and might brighten the space nicely.
 
I take it back. I woloculd choose a different location for the wine and turn that cedar closet into the ultimate humidor!
 
Save the closet for your sweaters and find somewhere else for the carboys.
 
My next AWS meeting is about Rhone wines so I started doing some research. Don't know how Bordeaux came up in a Rhone search but:

Entire grape clusters are placed in vats and filled with carbonic gas when winemakers want to emphasize fruit over tannin and structure. Cedar: Cedar is a common scent found in Bordeaux wines from the Medoc appellations. It smells of cedar wood, or an old cedar chest.
 
Yes, but that does not mean that they expose the wine to cedar. Could just be that this is the flavor components that develop in the wine.
 
"Every time I went and got wood all I could think was "man, there has to be a way to get a hint of that cedar into an agreeable wine...""

You might want to try Retsina, a style of Greek wine. It has a unique flavor because it is aged with pine resin (historically, to deter oxidizing). I don't care for it personally, too astringent for me, but i imagine cedar aging would have a similar flavor effect.
 
My general opinion is similar to the comments above, that heavy duty odors should be avoided when possible. That being said, my cellar walls and ceiling are covered in 1/4" tongue and groove cedar, purchased at the local home store, but it never had a very powerful odor, though you could detect it slightly when it was new, it has diminished to almost nothing as the cellar is now 16yrs old. I'm not an expert on cedar, but I would assume that there are certain types or grades that contain more of the aromatic compounds which would be more desirable for closet construction, and maybe less desirable for cellar construction. In my case, I don't feel that there is any cedar impact on my wines, but who knows, I may have cellar palate......
 

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