Anyone who lives in a metropolitan centre and who does their grocery shopping by foot or by public transportation knows just how heavy all those liquids we buy really are. Those of us who live in a place where supermarkets have parking lots should all live in a city centre for at least a period of six months in order to be able to appreciate supermarkets with parking lots.

The reason for this is that liquids way a ton, they really do, and it is for this reason that wall hanging wine racks frequently fall off the wall, and take some of the wall down with them.

How do we Prevent This?

If you are thinking of using wall hanging wine racks, think twice before choosing the wine rack you hang up on your wall. A wall hanging wine rack should not be too large unless it is built into the wall itself, and wall hanging wine racks should also not be larger than a capacity of 3-4 bottles of wine, on average.

If you desperately want to hang up a rack that accommodates many more bottles of wine than this, make sure that you seriously think about engineering and physics before you take that wine rack home to hang it up on the wall. As mentioned before, the problem lies not in the weight of the rack but in the weight of all those bottles of wine.

Wall hanging wine racks should be designed to evenly distribute the weight of the bottles over a large area of wall space, and such wine racks should have many contact spots with the wall, not just one or two; putting screws through the wall in 4-6 places will distribute the weight of the wine over the space behind the rack.

If you have only one or two screws through the wall, most walls will not be solid enough to support the weight of filled wall hanging wine racks. Of course, an empty rack will hold up just fine, but as soon as those bottles are put in, the rack will begin to tear the wall apart from the inside out.

In addition to the hanging mechanisms, you should consider the positioning that is intended for the bottle that you will place in wall hanging wine racks. Remember that bottles should always be placed with the neck inclined so that the cork does not dry out, but because of this sort of reclining position of the bottles, the physics get complicated.

A wine rack is not simply a shelf on which wine bottles stand, if it were, the bottles would simply be placed close to the wall, causing the least possible gravitational pull against the shelf. Look for wine racks with a steeper angle (bottles should be suspended at a 60° angle or more; bottles suspended at 10 or 20 degree angles will pull more harshly on the wall on which the wine rack is hung.