Storage

I’m curious if any of you have run into this issue and and if so, what you did about it. I currently own a a Eurocave with space for I think 120 bottles or so. I live in Minnesota in a 3,600 sq ft house with a basement and utility room, so I just keep the Eurocave in the utility room. No fuss, no muss.

However, I’m thinking about making a move out East…probably to one of the Philadelphia suburbs, but it would be a different type of living situation. Right now I live in a house in the burbs…like totally in the boonies. This move, even though it would still be in the suburbs, would be drastically different because I wouldn’t be looking at a 3,600 sq ft house. I’d be looking at more of an apartment style living. So, obviously space would be at a huge premium. In the apartments I’ve been looking at, I just don’t see any spots that could accommodate my Eurocave.

I think the highest number of bottles I ever accumulated was around 70, but I have numerous bottles that I’ve been aging for many years (some probably close to 10 years by now) plus I got sick and had to spend a significant time in the hospital and before I got the idea of moving out East, I had a whole plan in place to move out West, so I was drinking, rather than buying…I wanted to dwindle my stock down so I didn’t have to move as many bottles. I probably haven’t bought a bottle of wine in at least 3 years.

Anyway, my question is, to those of you that have fine wine that you age, but live in a smaller apartment or just some dwelling that doesn’t have space for a Eurocave or one of its competitors, how do you store your fine wine? How do you keep it at the right temperature and humidity? And if you have a large collection, how do you handle that situation if you live in a smaller dwelling?

In a perfect world, I would just bring my Eurocave with me and all would be well, but like I said, space is at such a premium out East that I just don’t know if I can find a spot for it.

I downsized into a smaller house and ended up with a wine fridge in my bedroom, the guest bedroom, and my office.

Welcome to the board. Can’t help with your specific question since we are still in the large house but if you have any questions on the Philly burbs, there are plenty of us on the board from the area.

I live in a smallish townhouse so I pay for offsite storage that is temperature and humidity controlled. My unit holds 108 bottles. It’s obviously an added monthly expense but I saw it as my only option given my space constraints and I’m happy with it.

Matt,

I had two wine fridges in five different apartments including two in Manhattan (one of which was a fifth-story walk up) so it can definitely be done. In two of those cases, one of the cabinets was a double-wide 280 bottle Le Cache (I had to swap this one out when I moved to the walk up). Finding space for one Eurocave, especially in the Philadelphia suburbs (which is not the most expensive place to live), shouldn’t be hard. As noted upthread, you just need to look for a corner of any room. You won’t even notice it is there after a couple of weeks. Your Eurocave is also your friend in this regard as it is so much more quiet than other cabinets. It can go anywhere.

The other obvious solution is offsite storage but that wouldn’t seem to make a lot of sense if the most stock you’ve ever accumulated was 70 bottles and you already own a Eurocave. In fact, with that small of a stock, you can go with a half-height Eurocave (I picked one up on Craigslist for less than $600), which can easily disappear in an apartment.

Good luck with the move!

Eric

When we lived in an apartment, we had a 24 bottle wine fridge to keep the nicer bottles we were about to drink, a wine shelf for daily drinkers that sit around at room temperature (seems like you may not have a lot of those), and an offsite storage for everything else and longer term aging.

Now we still have the offsite storage (actually, doubled it) and a 800 bottle wine cellar at home. Still not enough space, but that’s a different problem :wink:

Thanks Steve. Any info on the Main Line suburbs? That’s where I was thinking about it moving. Actually both my brother and his fiancé and myself were thinking about moving out there to one of the cities.

Like I said before, I live in a MN suburb…actually my brother lives right across the street from me. We’re all sick of our community. First of all, I’m 40 and single and they’re in their mid 40’s and none of us have kids. Our community is chock full of kids. I have nothing against kids but we’re like the only ones who don’t have any. But mainly we’re just sick of our suburb not having anything to do. Our suburb of 80,000 people has just about every chain restaurant you can think of, but you can probably count one hand the number of “nice” independent restaurants. There are no bars/lounges (unless you count the bars at the chains like Applebee’s or Famous Dave’s) or tap rooms, no downtown area at all. Right now if I want to go get a sandwich, it’s a 30 minute round trip drive. It’s not very far distance wise but with traffic and all it adds up. We’re all looking for walk ability. We’d like to have the option of walking to multiple different bars and restaurants and also hopefully some type of “scene”. A place to catch a band or something. Do the Main Line suburbs describe this at all or am I way out in left field on this?

While there are mini downtowns along the Main Line, there isn’t anything that that I would consider a true downtown. A place like Wayne has lots of great places to eat and many of them are BYOBs. I really don’t know anything about the band scene on the Main Line. If you are in any of the towns on the Main Line you have easy train access to any other town on the Main Line. Walking distance to any of this comes with a price especially if you don’t have kids and are taking advantage of the school districts which drive up the cost. If you want to be in the western suburbs, you may want to consider West Chester which is a college town with lots to do but enough nicer restaurants to keep adults happy and very walkable from new condos/apartments. Depends on what your price points are and where you will be working. Happy to answer questions here or through PM.

If you’re not tied to the Mainline/willing to go a bit further in toward Philly, Chestnut Hill could fit a lot of those requests…or if you can do the Northern burbs, Doylestown would be particularly good and has a lot of apartments being built.

Consider moving into the city itself if you want the kind of experience you are describing. Manayunk and the Falls area of Philly have a lot of what you are looking for in a very compact area. I lived in Philly for 11 years and my daughter has been there for 4 years. Tons of stuff to do that is local and the BYOB restaurant options are unbelievable. Outside of San Francisco, you are not going to get more BYOB’s with interesting and excellent food. One of the great secrets of the east coast dining markets. Main line is quite expensive and you are going to drive everywhere or take the train system. Traffic to move around from suburbs to the city is difficult. If you have a lifestyle with no children, city living is well worth considering. Extra bonus living near the Schuylkill river is the wonderful Fairmont Park system. If you are interested at all in museums and concerts, Philadelphia has become second only to NYC on the East Coast in options. DC is pretty close, but waaaaay more expensive.

Of course consider the source of my opinions, I am a Philadelphia home boy at heart. Big downsides are the city wage taxes, but if you are living in the burbs and working in the city they will bite you anyway! Of course there is always the grittier side of living in Philly, but then again that is why the hockey mascot is named…Gritty. And Eagles fans are unique, to put it mildly.

Of course the one caveat of all this is the Covid impact that is stressing the kind of interesting small restaurants and venues that make the city so vibrant and exciting. I certainly hope they all find a way to survive.

Yeah, just put the cave in some room. I used to have one in the bedroom, moved it to the hallway, that one died, now I have one in the guest bedroom and one in my office.

I guess I never really thought about putting it in the guest bedroom. I’ll probably be looking for a place with 2 bedrooms. A. I doubt I’ll have that many overnight visitors anyway and B, like others have said it’s not very loud. And C. If I do have an overnight visitor he’ll probably be so drunk that it wouldn’t matter how loud it is. champagne.gif

I was looking at Manayunk too. Unless my map skills failed me, that’s a lot closer to the actual city. From what I read up about Manayunk, it’s a younger, more lively city, which might be what I’m looking for. But this stupid COVID mess kind of put all of our plans on hold for now. So the longer this goes on, the longer we do nothing and the more ideas pop into our heads.

Manayunk fits what you are talking about. It has been hit hard by COVID-19 with a few high profile permanent closings, hopefully it will come back. Manayunk is in the city limits so you do have the wage tax issue if you aren’t working in the city.