A Simple Wine Rack

About two years ago, I helped a friend with his custom bed frame idea. It mainly consisted of a couple sheets of birch plywood with dados cut to create little cubby areas under the bed. When he had completed the project, he had some left over plywood he didn't need, and  I offered to take it off his hands. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it immediately, but I let them sit in the garage while I considered a project.

Later that week, I realized my batch of Liebsfraumilch wine was about done fermenting and I realized what I needed: a place to store 30 bottles of wine. I had my plan then, and the only thing left was to create the plans for the wine rack. I settled on the classic wine storage rack design, and set to work on the dimensions in SketchUp. Eventually I ended up with this:

The design is simple and sturdy, and ideal for my needs. I used all of the birch plywood I obtained for this project, and I was able to complete it in my first weekend. To be completely honest, this isn't the first time I attempted this. Nearly four years ago, I attempted this with pine wood, but the wood cupped really badly before I was able to complete the project. Also at the time I didn't have the tools available that I had in this attempt; namely a table saw. Needless to say, it worked out quite nicely.

I liked the result of the plan, but I wasn't really in favor of seeing the plywood layers. So I wanted to cover them up, and so I ripped some oak strips to act as edge banding and glued them on. In addition, I was concerned that the bottles may fall right out the back, so I took some birch that I had from wood pallets and cut them into strips to create a backing stop. I didn't have much material to work with, so I had to live with thin strips spaced to cover the area.

In the end, I finished it with some Natural Danish Oil and called it a day. It holds about 40 - 750ml wine bottles.