Wine storage building should be designed to maintain specific indoor temperature conditions to ensure wine preservation. With this purpose, the goal of this study is the identification of an effective and efficient modeling approach suitable for common typologies of wine storage buildings. The specific aim is the assessment of the reliability and precision of different solutions for the discretization in thermal zones of the internal volume through horizontal "airwalls", based on the comparison between digital simulation outputs with real recorded thermal data. Two different modeling approaches are analyzed through EnergyPlus thermal simulation software, by considering internal space consisting of one or two thermal zones. Simulation results are compared with data monitored for three years over a significant study case, and undergo a validation and acceptability procedure. The method proved to be a valid tool to assess results reliability in aboveground building modeling. The correctness of the use of "airwall" as horizontal partition was also verified. Results could help designers to optimize the building energy modeling. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.