Ready for Happy Hour

I love wine. My uncle is a distributor and my Dad ran restaurants for years, so I think it was destined to be! Mike and I did a good bit of wine touring while living in California and even got married in Santa Ynez wine country.

Long story short —we drink a ton of wine so we buy wine frequently.

We are out of storage already in the refrigerated wine bar area we put in the house. When we were in planning phase, my Dad tried to get us to dedicate a whole room to wine in our house and we said "oh we don't need anything near that extravagant" but sure enough, we have extra cases hanging out in our pantry instead.

On a separate timeline, I had this blank wall in my kitchen for a bit now (in the breakfast nook) and I had a photograph already in the kitchen, and then the Nelson clock, so was trying to figure out what to do there on this big white wall.

This is the wall in mention, before we renovated

Photograph, already in the kitchen

Nelson clock, already in the kitchen

I felt like more art would start to look like an art gallery because you can see paintings in the DR and den as well as the clock and photograph, from the kitchen vantage point. A TV was suggested which made me absolutely cringe :) I didn't want art, but wanted something industrial that went with the contemporary feel of the kitchen. 

I started toying around with the idea of wine racks when Mike sent me these for another reason:

But as the bottles come out perpendicular to the wall, I was afraid it would be too obtrusive in the room.
Not to mention they aren't for sale yet.

Then I found these restaurant style racks from Wine Enthusiast, and thought this idea would be great for storing extra 'everyday' bottles.

...where the bottles sit against the wall

Not sure where this pic came from but seeing it on this white all made me think it would work in our kitchen

So off we went. We decided to only hang three on the wall b/c we were looking at odd numbers of either 3 or 5 based on design principle. In this case I have to say I think I could have gone with 4, but here's the end result with 3 and I'm still over the moon with the look, not to mention the storage factor!

These were MUCH harder to hang than it looks. It took four of us several hours to
get the spacing calculated, and the racks installed!

Here's the finished product in the breakfast nook

Cheers!