Probably the best solution available, but be mindful of a few details:

1) As other reviewers have mentioned, you assemble the parts like "lincoln logs" except the holes are not as forgiven. So it's a constant battle with each connector to hammer in straight with trying not to hammer the assembled pieces out of alignment. Just accept that you'll need to rehammer the alignment a lot.

2) A rubber hammer, as suggested by the instructions, is a good idea if not a requirement.

3) It appears they sand the parts *before* drilling the holes, as there were rough wood splinters protruding out of all of the holes. I chose to resand to remove all of those bits before assembly. Otherwise, they would have permanently stuck out around the connectors and interfered with hammering the connectors into place.

All in all, I don't regret the purchase.

This is basic wood and dowels. But it seems well thought out. Just be aware you will be spending a lot of time hammering dowels into the cross pieces. Use the proper touch, not too hard, not too soft. You can judge your alignment when you get the next pieces together. It does the job, but it is not fancy. The wood is rough and raw. I supposed you could paint/oil it.

I bought a J.K. Adams 12-bottle wine rack several years ago, and it worked great and served its purpose fine. I configured it with 3 octagonal sticks by 5, thus wasting one stick, because of the size of the space I was putting the rack in (these "sticks" are the big dowels you see in the picture). But it still worked for 12 bottles - 8 bottles enclosed in the rack, and four on top. In fact I could sneak three more in by placing them on the top four bottles.

That all went fine for many years, until a couple weeks ago my wife and I were in California doing some wine tasting, and decided to buy a case of wine (12 bottles) from one winery, plus 4 bottles from another. Our original rack was full, so we had to do something quick! I bought two more of these J.K. Adams 12-bottle kits. I considered buying a 40-bottle kit, but two 12's were cheaper, and were all I really needed.

I was able to increase the capacity of the existing rack laterally by adding six octagonal sticks, for a total of 6 bottles per row or 18 totally in the rack. I made a second rack with 21 octagons, yielding 18 more bottles, for a total of 36, plus what I can squeeze on top of the top racks.

It took me a few minutes to get into the rhythm of how to put it together, but following the simple instructions with my mallet on my workbench worked pretty well.

The instructions say that if it the rack is kept short, no glue is necessary. My old rack did not have any glue, and it kept together nicely all these years. I tapped it to tighten up the joints before I added the new octagons, but it really had held together nicely.

This product works very well at holding all 12 bottles of wine. It was very flexible for assembly in that all of the larger 'posts' have dowel holes drilled on all sides; this allowed us to assemble the rack 3 high and 4 wide. The dowels fit tight into the assembly holes and required a dead blow hammer to fully seat them in place. We rest the back of the bottle on the rear dowel and the neck of the bottle on the front dowel; this allows the bottle to tilt down in the front to keep the corks 'wet'. The wood quality was quite good and, in our case, we elected to paint the rack and then 'distress' the finish.

Why the four stars rather than five you ask? After assembly there are four empty dowel holes on each corner post and two empty dowel holes on each side post. I ended up purchasing dowel plugs at a local hardware store (not a great cost) but would have thought these would have been included to provide a more 'finished' look to the rack.

I have had an older similar rack for over 10 years and needed to expand it to hold more bottles. I originally ordered what I thought was a matching kit but it was very unstable and nothing matched up size-wise. This rack was a perfect match and even though the original rack was much older the grain and color of the wood was also a perfect match. Instead of putting it together as shown in the photo, I assembled it in a straight line at the pegs matched up perfectly to mate with my older rack. Since it wasn't exactly designed for what I was doing I ended up with one large tinker toy style hexagonal piece but lacked the pegs to fill the final slot. A quick trip to the hardware store to buy a cheap dowel rod and cutting 4 sections to 3 1/2 inch lengths let me use the final leftover piece.