Wall-height wine rack / wine display

Are you a wine lover? Do you have a collection of bottles that are too pretty to hide away in a cupboard? This wall-height wine rack / wine display is an easy build using 2×2’s and will showcase 18 bottles.

Good morning everyone!

Hope you are snuggled in with a hot tea/coffee/cocoa enjoying this last quiet weekend before the Holiday mayhem?
I love Christmas – so much so that my daughter’s middle name is Noelle – but I only really love it from November 1st to December 23rd. After that the mayhem of travelling and entertaining and pants that get tighter and tighter with every display of lack-of-willpower gets tiring. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, but I miss my pyjama pants and a quiet house too.

But that’s neither here nor there – you came here to see a wall-height wine rack right?

Unfortunately, I don’t have too many build-stage photos to share with you. It’s a fairly straight-forward DIY with pocket holes drilled into the back of every cross-section. I did however, draw up build plans so you can get an idea of measurements and spacing.

The final measurements for this wine display were given to me from the person that I built it for – so there is no rhyme or reason based on structural needs; it was about her space.

The entire wall-height wine rack is made from 2″ x 2″ framing lumber. In hindsight, I should have used select pine for a smoother finish and less sanding. Better still would have been if I’d used a hardwood at 1″ square…. but hindsight is 20-20 right?

I built the front and back sections separately, matching spacing between shelves at roughly 9 3/8″. All of the pieces are held together with 1 ½” pocket hole screws and wood glue.

Once the front and back of the wine display were built, I inserted a 2 ½” piece of 2″ x 2″ between the frames at the bottom, top and roughly the middle (lined up with a shelf). These were screwed in from the front and back with 2″ screws and then wood filler to hide the heads.

The spacing and size of the shelves allowed for 2 bottles to be displayed per shelf, with enough of a gap in the middle that the bottles wouldn’t jostle and roll off. They nest in perfectly and you shouldn’t hear any clinking if someone walks heavily into a room or bangs on the wall that it’s hanging on.

This wall-height wine rack could be made out of metal – but I don’t know metal work (yet) and I was concerned that glass on metal would clink and rattle away with every footstep in the house?

After a LOT of sanding – again, buying a select (premium) hardwood would have reduced this time considerably, I added a black stain (Spanish Oak by Old Masters).

I love the look of the dark, but then most of my builds end up black don’t they? I have a type. 😂

What Michele wanted was a rustic white with a bit of dark showing through, so I coated over the Spanish oak black with a pickled white – again, Old Masters – to see what I could come up with.

I don’t drink wine (blech – rotten fruit!) so I didn’t have enough bottles to create a display in my dining room.

It ended up this wasn’t quite the colour Michele was going for either, so she added another coat once she got her wine display rack home.

Better still, she added a beautiful collection of bottles.

I’ll be honest – the wall-height wine rack is nice – but I can’t take my eyes off of her baseboards! 😍

I’m thinking now that a downlight between the top cross bars would really make this wine display pop; with a warm glow shining down on the collection of bottles?

But that’s what building and DIY are all about right? Try, learn, laugh (or cry) and try again.

Updated 01/01/22 – Michele added extra rows and decided on black for the wine rack and it is STUPENDOUS!!