So, after at least three years of talking about it, I finally bought a LeCache and it was delivered yesterday (not without incident, but so far the issues seem to be getting handled well). So now I’m planning what portion of my offsite wine to bring to the house, and how to keep track of what’s in there. I’ve done a terrible job of keeping my CT inventory up to date, partially because my offsite locker is so stuffed full that I can’t easily get to stuff to find or inventory it. I’m hoping this will give me the opportunity to do a little bit of a better job (probably not, but let me live the fantasy for a little while…).
I’m curious if any of you actually track the locations of bottles within the cabinet, rather than just whether they’re in the cabinet or not. If so, how do you do it? I know some people organize their cabinets by grouping the types of wines together, but my collection is so random and ever-changing that I’d have to shuffle stuff all the time to make room or fill in gaps. I also don’t necessarily have even numbers of everything, so making sure both wines in each slot are the same (for easier browsing) isn’t really practical.
I’m considering actually numbering the slots (row+column), and recording that as the bin in CT. Is this insane? Have any of you done this, and do you have any lessons learned?
Sean, I look forward to seeing some of the responses in this thread as I’ve wondered if there is a better way for me to do this…
An example of the bin numbering I use for my cabinet is as follows:
A-1-F - first shelf, first slot in the front
A-5-R - first shelf, fifth slot in the rear
Obviously some shelves will have the ability to hold more than one level of bottles. For those I basically use the same system:
C-4-F2 - third shelf, fourth slot in the second level, front row
F-2-R3 - sixth shelf, second slot in the third level in the rear
Hopefully that makes sense. And I dread seeing a response with a better method than mine because I’ll be tempted to redo my whole cabinet!!
It really depends on how much searching you want to do each time.
In my cellar I’ve used a larger grid - each bin is 5 columns wide and 18 rows high, with the rows divided into sub-bins - so A1, A2 . . . F3. That, plus bottle tags, allows me to find anything quickly enough. And I don’t need label makers or anything.
Regardless, CT is great for tracking this stuff regardless of what system you adopt.
Sure, I’ve done this and would encourage it, but after a couple years I’ve personally become too lazy/inconsistent to keep up with all the in/out, which is (a) unfortunate, (b) but occasionally the source of nice surprises. No “front/back” labeling in CT - I’m not that OCD - and for the bit of bulk storage at the top left & right I just use UL & UR. I made little labels for every third row (letters; columns are numbers), but our humble household has no fancy-pants label maker: masking tape & a Sharpie for us!
The standard stuff. The delivery company was clueless, did some (cosmetic) damage to both the cabinet and the house, didn’t follow the instructions for leveling (I just did it myself after they left, because after a brief exchange with them, I didn’t really want them messing with any of it), etc. Also they complained incessantly about how heavy it is. Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m paying to have it brought in instead of doing it myself (this is just a 2400, being delivered about 10 feet inside the door on the first floor, btw).
Anyway, the manufacturer’s help with fixing the damage to the cabinet so far has been good, so I’m not too upset at the moment.
Cool, this is fairly similar to what I’m thinking, though I don’t think I’d bother with recording whether stuff is in the first or second deep. I think once I find the slot, it’ll be obvious enough if it’s the front or back bottle I’m looking for.
I did mine this way: columns numbered from left to right, rows lettered from top to bottom. Put a 0 in front of any single digit column.
Thus, 03d means the wine is in the third column from the left, fourth row from the top.
Mine is two deep - I see no point in labeling front versus back, as that’s easy to figure out when you look in the cabinet.
The real challenge is keeping up with it as you go. Logging bottles in and out and you add and subtract, particularly when you’re rushing around to get dinner together and pull a bottle out.
One thing you can do to try to make up for the shortcomings in logging bottles out is to occasionally print out a report by Location, look at all the bins that show 3 or more bottles, and go figure out which one you drank but forgot to log out of CT.
Good luck. CT is the right way to go, but it only works as well as you do in logging stuff in and out.
I track(ed) unit and shelf for my 2 smallish eurocaves. I don’t go to location on shelf. Most of the shelves are 12 bottle, single-layer rollers but there are a few fixed shelves with stacks of bottles. Nonetheless, I find (I really should say ‘found’ as I’ve gotten really lazy and out-of-date) that I could put my hands on everything pretty quickly w/ that level of detail. Example - ‘ER7’ - Eurocave, on the Right side, seventh shelf from bottom.
I’ve found any numeric system (i.e specific location) to be way too cumbersome for me over time. Same for id tags etc. The changing nature of my cellar coupled with laziness is too much. I need simple and pragmatic. For many years now I organize by region, producer, and vintage in that order, alphabetically or numerically as the case may be. That way anything is easy for me to find. The problem comes if it is at or near capacity. Been there too many times and the solution is simply, to have 10-20% of open spaces. That way it is easy to shift things as you will invariably need to. The alternative is to simply jam that extra bottle in a random place or to move possibly hundreds of bottles to put one in the correct location when the space is full. So unless you have enough time and are organized enough to noted each bottle’s location. I’d encourage you to leave ample space in there which I know is the opposite of what any sane or insane wine collector wants to do.
I have a 5200, which is location “La Cache” in CT. Each slot is a separate bin, with the columns identified by letter and the row by number, so the second row of the second column is B02. I found that further dividing each slot into front and back is unnecessary. Most important is that you use two digits for the numbers or you will be driven mad by.CT’s sorting. It you use one digit, it will sort as A1, A11, A12, A2, etc. if you use two digits, you get A01, A02, A11, A12, etc.
I do this (and I have 3 coolers, with 3 different systems - F3 is in the big cooler upstairs, 3F is in the big cooler downstairs, and f3 is in the smaller cooler downstairs. Agree front v back isn’t worth it. My only issue for CT with this is when you print you get a different row for each bin. I have a spreadsheet (and I’m no Excel maven) where I just have a quantity cell (12) and a location cell that combines rack slots with box numbers in offsite storage (F3 F4 F5 Dom142[6]). I end up with one row for each wine instead of one row for each location, which at my volume is essential if the paper is to be usable (and I like having a “wine list,” as much as I would like to have every outside reference in the world linked to my inventory a la CT).
More detail than you wanted, but it was just to illustrate the point that it’s worth thinking about what would be easy to use for you and just come up with a system that’s relatively simple. It doesn’t have to be a prepackaged solution.
Sean, I find it easy to identify location in CT. I have multiple storage units in my house, and with CT I know if a bottle is in the garage vault, the living room vault or in the under-the-staircase rack. Like most people, here, I use a strategy where rows and columns are identified by letters and numbers. I do not use labels since I am able to quickly count across and up to locate a bottle. Once upon a time, before starting with CT, I used those plastic/cardboard hanging neck labels, but, now I find them to be a nuisance. I know that a lot of people attach barcodes to the bottles and use a scanner to log bottles in/out. My inventory is not that great. I rarely drink more than a bottle at a time, and I rarely buy more than a 12-15 bottles at a time to input. So, inventory management is pretty easy for me.
Oh, and in my opinion it is futile to try to allocate space for each type of wine. Once your cabinet approaches capacity you find that that all your allocated space for, say, Syrah is filled up, but you just received a shipment that you ordered six months ago. So, you put those bottles into locations that next to the Pinot Noirs and the Zinfandels.
I only go so far as to say which unit a bottle is in. I started out entering location in CT, but found that it quickly deteriorated, especially with units where many bottles are stacked rather than having individual slots. Things get moved around too much to keep it current. If I remove one on the bottom and re-stack those on top, I didn’t change every single bottle that moved as a result. Then there would be times when I needed to get a whole case in to keep it cool and didn’t have time to note individual bottle locations. Or oddly shaped bottles would necessitate moving a number of other things. Even with sliding shelves that had slots, I’d remove one and then bring others forward and I would never want to go back to CT to change all the moved bottles. With an active cellar, bottles coming in and out almost daily, it was a nice idea that didn’t work in the real world. What did work was knowing that, within my Eurocave, the lower right was Riesling, lower left white burgs, etc. etc. It never took me much time to find things within a given quadrant.
I track exact location and it makes it infinitely more fun than my pre-cellar system of dump and find. There have been many days where I have been sitting in my office, called home, and said to my son, “Go to the cellar, seventh column from the right, eighth row from the top, front slot, pull out the bottle and stand it up” and the only reason I tell him what the label is supposed to say is as insurance against an incorrect entry. My cellar has 41 columns of 750s. Each column has either 21 or 18 slots, depending on exactly where it is, and each slot is double deep. Every bottle in the cellar has a specific location designation in CT. So if I want to drink a bottle of 2002 Lignier-Michelot Clos de la Roche GC tonight (what, the Saxum addict owns that?), I look it up and see 10-05-B. I go down to the cellar, go to the tenth column from the right, the fifth row down, rear slot, and pull it out with more time to enjoy it due to less time wasted trying to find it. If I want to check for data entry errors, I get a list of all wines by bin, and if I show two bottles in the same bin, it means I have an error. If I can’t find the occasional empty rear slot, I do the same sort and look down the list quickly to find to consecutive entries with an F suffix, meaning there is a B missing. The one thing I have to do is remember never to move a bottle. I did that with two bottles last year and I still can’t find the mistake.
I log which cabinet and which shelf has a bottle when I make an attempt. I have two Eurocaves and a small Avanti. Hoping to get the inventory caught up this winter.
As some others have written, I also use a grid system (following the letters for columns, numbers for rows convention because I originally did this in Excel). For rows 1-9 I use a leading zero (e.g., C-04-F is the third column, fourth row, front position). I use the leading zero in order to sort the info correctly. I designate whether it is front or rear because I also like to know how many empty slots I have. This also makes it easy for my wife to grab bottles if I’m not around physically.
I have an offsite location with 3-deep racks and I have F, M, and R for those.
Speaking of le cache. Storage question. Technically they count the top row above the racks as a “storage space” in their bottle count.
They also count the bulk storage space.
Question: if u put bottles above the rack, can u store a case of wine sitting ON those bottles above the rack?? Can the bottle withstand the weight (not to mention if u want to take it out you’d have to remove the bulk storage?)
I had the Le Cache that holds about 450 bottles. I thought about labeling specific bottle locations but quickly realized as inventory came in I had to shuffle bottles around. It was such a pain to relocate. So instead it designated certain areas of the racking for types of wine or region. It didn’t take long to find bottles, so that’s the route I’d recommend.
. Looking forward to ideas here too.