Hi Mike! I visited a Dallas based storage/store a couple times…one time I was there buying a couple wines and suddenly a a few folks showed up and broke out - really nice bottles popping open… I look over at my wife and she’s drinking a 15 yr old Chevalier-Montrachet with some other guy. She asks…you want some?
I would love to store my wines at this place - party waiting to happen! Instead, i live in suburbia and my wine storage is in a different suburbia. Don’t get me wrong - I have about 200 bottles at home so I can pop something if I want! I would just love the spontaneity of popping some corks with others at 5 pm on Friday!
Same here, I’ve got a full Eurocave at home and bottles everywhere. But the idea of driving down to Dallas for off-site is too much. I might just get into the storage business with space somewhere in the burbs.
IMHO Uline is expensive and their boxes tend to be oversized, so they don’t support stacking high. As has been mentioned, ditch the styro.
Some of my clients organize boxes by their drinking window. They might label boxes ‘2015’, ‘2016’, etc. and put two bottles of a case in six different boxes (years). Then they come in and pull all the ‘2015’ boxes and go home.
The way I organize offsite storage is to have none of it (sorry Chuck). I have a now fairly mature cellar overflowing with about 1000 bottles. We don’t plan our cooking very far ahead, so wines are often matched a hour before the meal. I hate the experience of dropping down to the cellar for the perfect aged bottle of X, only to find that it’s at the off-site. I also find very disappointing going to a tasting with wine buddies and having them say “I really wanted to bring a bottle of X, but I wasn’t able to make it to the offsite this week…”
I got lucky at my facility. Over time, as I needed more space, lockers opened up in my row, so I have 3 within a thirty foot stretch. All three are two cardboard cases deep.
The first holds 60 bdx cases, and I put a stainless shelving unit in there, so I never have to move more than three or so cases to get to one that is buried, as I configured the shelving so they hold either two standard cardboard or three cardboard or wood flats high.
The second (30 case capacity) has a five column double deep wood rack that holds 180 bottles (5w x 2d x 18 h) of the slimmer persuasion. The rack left about 9" at the top, where I fitted a piece of masonite, and all 17 of my magnums fit up there. There was also vertical room to the right, and I stacked a single vertical column of 18-4" x 24" cardboard tubes there. These hold larger 750’s and I can go 3 deep with 375’s in these.
The third 24 case locker just holds full cardboard and wood cases of younger stuff that I am less likely to want in the near future. Ionly have to re-jigger this one twice a year. Not a fan of those 40-50 case play dates…
All cartons are marked with a designation (each locker uses a different system), and the wines/quantity are marked on the outside, and all tracked in Cellartracker at about 97% accuracy.
And the real near term drinkers are in a 60 bottle cooler at home.
My offsite is a mess right now; I need to spend a day there organizing bottles again.
When I want to repatriate bottles from my offsite, I use CT to sort bottles by location and then I browse the list and make a list of what I want to grab. I store 400+ bottles at home so I’m usually not overly concerned about finding something to drink but there are times I want certain wines at home.
I organize my offsite by region and kinda/sorta by producer but you wouldn’t see that right now. So, in a perfect world, I would normally know where to look for my bottle. I had a separate racking locker and another box storage locker. My boxes are numbered and that number is a location in CT. Also, my racking locker is another location and it was organized by region.
I’m going to consolidate all of my wine into one location that has racking and shelving for boxes so soon my wines will be organized again.
This probably didn’t help but it’s convincing me to get my butt to Seattle and get my wine organized. I’ll be there in the next couple of weeks Chuck, very busy at work.
I’m in frisco and started using an offsite last year in Addison. It’s a pain. Looking at a EuroCave or converting a closet, but struggling with the economics and space.
Kind of depends on how your locker is set up. Mine has shelves, some don’t. But first: keeping the wines in their styro shippers is suicide for storage efficiency. You have to get them out of stryo and into normal wine boxes (preferably cardboard, unless you have OWC for certain wines - wood is heavier, and less space efficient).
I don’t worry too much about where bottles are, though I keep a list of what’s in each case, and what cases are on which shelf. Then if I need a particular wine I can go to that shelf and find the case it’s in if I’ve been particularly systematic, I’ll have a little graphic of which box numbers are where on each shelf, a little 3x3 grid).
To really maximize storage, you want to match the bottles to the boxes. E.g., don’t store bordeaux bottles in burgundy/pinot boxes, that leaves unused space. Don’t store short bottles in tall boxes, etc. Then just play around to see how you can position and rotate boxes to get the most in your locker.
I am new to the offsite life. I am divided between a Eurocave here, a Eurocave there and an offsite (there)
I have arranged my offsite locker by drinkability and have attached a packing list to the exterior of each box.
Once shipments really begin arriving I am screwed though.
Used to have case boxes and had each box numbered and entered into CT. Relocated to Dallas and got lockers with double-deep tubes. Went from 28 case locker (which really only held 26-27 lay flat bordeaux boxes) to 24 cases in tubes. But there is room for two more cases on top of the tubes between the ceiling. So essentially same capacity and far easier access. I have three lockers: domestic red, foreign red, and whites. Love this setup and its a breeze to find most things as I organize by either region or type of wine. Can’t imagine going back to bulk boxing.
I store at same location as Jeb with same setup. See pic below, sorry it’s sideways but you get the idea. Love it, so much easier to access than boxes. I’m more anal on location tracking, assigning rows alpha codes going down and numeric across. All loaded in CT.
My offsite storage (Domaine in Chicago) is for long term ageing, as I have three wine units at home for stuff I’ll be drinking over the next couple of years.
That means I don’t put any real effort into organizing my locker other than using boxes that maximize the number of bottles I can get into the space. I use either the original wood cases or cardboard boxes that hold up to being stacked 3-4 tall. Then I just write what’s in the box on the side of it with a Sharpie. For the cardboards, I strongly tape the top and bottom with shipping tape. I keep a Sharpie and a roll of shipping tape in the locker.
One of the things that’s helped with maximizing the storage space is that I now store the champagne bottles (mostly mags and double mags with some singles) standing up and not in boxes. The corks really don’t need the direct contact (lots of threads on WB on this topic), and these bottles can stand up in parts of the locker that the boxes leave open.
Lastly, since I never know when I’ll be in the city (I live 30 miles west) and want to hit a restaurant for dinner ad-hoc, I keep a small rack with a dozen ready-to-drink bottles that I can just grab from the locker. I did that earlier this week.
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