Wine rack plans

Restaurant wine rack © 2007, by Alpha Vei-Chor Lau,

Wine refrigerators can store dozens of bottles. Vendors usually indicate the number of (standard) bottles that you can store in the cabinet. The wines would thus be lying ones under others, ones behind others, unreachable.

In order for you to easily reach your bottles, you may order a few shelves. Every added shelf reduces the total capacity of the wine cabinet. I am personally confortable with having three rows of bottles per shelf: one row of bottlenecks facing me and two rows of bottle bases.

Also bear in mind that wine bottles come in different forms.

Visiting the Chateau de Monbazillac for a degustation.

The lower stretch of the Dordogne river is rightly celebrated for the wines produced in its fertile valley, but there is so much more to the area that should not be missed. The rivers here are broad, meandering and majestic, and the hinterland is richly forested. Between the vineyards, fields of sunflowers and maize jostle for space.

Man has left his mark on the area from prehistoric times, with notable cave paintings at several grottes along the river valley. Later, the Romans arrived and vestiges of their works are scattered across the region. The region's heyday, however, came in the 12th century when King Henry II of England married Eleanor of Aquitane and gained the Bordeaux region for the English crown.