I have a 30ish bottle wine fridge filled with fairly nice bottles. We are going to be moving on Saturday and I’m trying to minimize the impact on the bottles. What is the best approach here? I was thinking taking the wines out Friday night and putting them in a box, and then hopefully getting them all back in the fridge by 3-4pm on Saturday after the move is completed. Thoughts?
You only have a few cases. Go to a store and ask for some empty wine boxes. Stores are usually happy to get rid of them. It’s not a big deal - just put them in your car. As long as they don’t sit in 100 degrees for a few days, you’re OK. You can leave them for a few days if you need to. I have ten cases on the floor right now because my wine fridge is full and I wasn’t able to get to off site storage.
This is definitely the quickest & easiest method.
But if you can’t find any wine boxes, then you can lay down the bottles in normal boxes & use towels and wash clothes to line between the bottles & prevent the bottles from clinking against one another [you can even wrap the bottles in several layers of bounty paper towel to get the same effect, and if we’re talking Grand Cru Burgundy here, then you can wrap the bottles in bubble wrap, and throw in some styrofoam peanuts for good measure].
Similarly, depending upon how much you actually care about these wines, you can place each box on a passenger’s seat, and secure a shoulder belt across the box for extra protection [the springs & the cushioning in the passengers’ seats help if you hit any nasty potholes in the road].
PS: For most of the United States, mid-March is just about the perfect time to be moving wine. If this were mid-July, you’d have so much more to worry about.
+1 on what Greg and Nathan said
Very carefully - those suckers are heavy. You don’t want to throw out your back.
I’ve moved my wines a couple of times and i’d agree with Greg and Nathan. You can pick up empty wine boxes or crates at you local wine shop and use them to move your wine. Maybe leave them in a closet or somewhere in your new home where there isn’t direct sunlight and you should be fine.
I agree with those above suggesting standard shipping boxes. If you had more bottles than that or couldn’t get boxes, large tupperware storage containers with towels between each layer, also works well. Fully loaded they hold about 30 bottles are are quite heavy, so would advise splitting them up. The largest size I’ve found at Target is almost exactly the same depth as a standard 750 bottle’s height, allowing fairly easily stacked rows laid down sideways. Bette for Burgundy style bottles on the bottom, alternating direction, with BDX style on top of those.
I’ve moved several hundred bottles a couple of times. Not fun at all, but moving companies wouldn’t do it.
I’ve moved several hundred bottles a couple of times. Not fun at all, but moving companies wouldn’t do it.
You might actually be lucky. My last one moved them for me. And they dropped the very first case they carried downstairs. I carried and packed the rest.
Mike - the suggestion about wrapping in towels would work too. I don’t know how far you’re moving but you can put three cases in your car and I’d probably do that. Figure a regular 12 bottle case weighs around 36 pounds, maybe a little more if you have heavy bottles. The cases I just got shipped weighed 39 pounds but they were shippers. So if you can’t get some empties, you can go to Home Depot or Walmart or Office Max and buy a few boxes. They’ll run you around a buck and a half. Don’t get the very cheapest Walmart boxes though - they’re real crap. And get a good tape - they’re rated on how much they’re able to hold so don’t buy the very cheapest one.
But if there’s a Trader Joes or any supermarket near you that sells wine, check them out first.
One last thing - if you pack your wine, you may end up getting a box that is made for Bordeaux shaped bottles and you’ll have Rhone shaped bottles that won’t fit into the slots. So alternate the way you pack your bottles, putting one right way up and one upside down. Or just get an extra box and don’t fill all the slots, although that’s not what I’d do because then the bottles slide around.
Where are you? Maybe someone on the board is close by and would like to get rid of some shippers.
Ouch Greg. I assume that’s why the companies don’t want their guys doing it. The last movers I had were not the type to inspire confidence in moving anything breakable.
Yeah, I would definitely not let a moving company touch my wine. When I moved Seattle → LA, I used Western Carriers. When I moved LA → OC, I drove it myself. Now I am not completely moving, but working on getting a portion of my collection from OC to Nashville, and I’ve been shuttling it a case at a time every time I fly back and forth. Not the most efficient method, but it’s working ok for my purposes…
These guys were the nightmare movers of all time. Unlike the Russians who held me up in NYC and told me they wouldn’t unload until I “took care of the guys” to the tune of $250 each, these guys were simply incompetent. The guy who dropped the case was about 6’4" and a bodybuilder. His sidekick was a super hard-working little nerdy but efficient guy. And the boss was a chubby big fellow who seemed to have some kind of mental issues. Within fifteen minutes he’d fired the bodybuilder guy. That guy went home and then came back, ripped his shirt off like the Incredible Hulk, and threatened to destroy the truck, the owner, and all of my stuff. Eventually that worked out someway. I think the owner gave him a day’s pay and sent him off.
Next he decided that the little nerdy guy was going to cost too much so that guy got fired next. The boss called his uncle, who apparently ran the operation, but who wouldn’t send him any more help. So the idiot decided he’d do it all himself. It was a rainy, nasty day and he was going to carry all my furniture alone down two flights because there was no elevator? So I ended up being the assistant.
But that wasn’t enough - he complained non-stop about my boxes. Apparently we had too many different sizes. I put light stuff like comforters in the biggest boxes, and heavy stuff like plates and appliances in smaller boxes. But he thought big boxes should go on the bottom and when he put heavy stuff on them, they crumbled. Put the big light boxes on top anybody? No. Big boxes always go on the bottom. The guy kept talking about “planning his build” and how the fact that all the boxes weren’t one size made it hard to visualize.
WTF this guy was doing running a crew I never understood.
Anyhow, I ended up only losing a half case. We packed as many cases of wine as we could into my car and drove it ourselves. I’m going to move again eventually and I’m not looking forward to it at all.
Thirty bottles - I agree with getting 3 boxes from the local liquor store and moving them yourself in the car. Or if long distance and they’re precious, get styro shippers and fly with them as checked luggage.
We used a local moving company for a short-distance (6 miles) same-day late winter move. I packed the cellar contents in cardboard boxes bought from an auction house and the movers did the heavy lifting. No problems. Sure movers can drop boxes but either it’s not that common or we were lucky.