Home Cellar Questions

WINE TALK
1

We’re about to close on a new home that has a temp and humidity controlled cellar. A few questions…

  1. Who do you recommend for wine insurance?

  2. What strategies do you use to keep everything organized?

  3. What device do you use to track temp and humidity remotely?

TIA.

2

There are recent threads on 1 and 3 if you run a search.

3

  1. Check your home owner’s policy, it may cover it. But in regard to heat damage, it probably would cover failure of refrigeration, not failure of air conditioning.

  2. I group by country and then by region.

  3. Since I’m not interested in getting an alert on my phone, I use an indoor-outdoor unit that shows temperature and humidity. Very inexpensive.

4

1). Check your homeowners but make sure they cover mechanical breakdowns, racks failing, etc… everything past fire, storms, theft, earthquake. Get everything in writing. Many people will recommend Chubb which is great, IMHO.

2). Use cellar tracker for organization. Put the wine where you have an empty space regardless of region, vintage or variety. I like this more than by region, variety, vintage or whatever because as your cellar grows or changes and your tastes change you aren’t moving bottles to keep regions or vintages together. As long as you can find the wines, as long as you know what you have and where it is, I never thought placing certain bottles in the same area was worth the effort. You can sort all of the details on Cellartracker. If you are looking for a vintage or variety or region Cellartracker will sort it for you and tell you where it is located.

3). There are a number of devices or ways to do this. I had my house alarm company put a temp controlled alarm on my cellar. If the temp got above or below whatever I specified, I got a text or phone call.

JD

5

I sort by region/producer/variety. It does break down over time without occasional re-orgs, but starting from empty you can at least start clean. If you can build in some whitespace/extra room in the vicinity where you expect your buying patterns to be stronger than your drinking patters, that will help some.