After some good advice to not go the row-column designation route for organizing a new cellar in Cellar Tracker, that leaves me to the question of what makes a good bin size in terms of numbers of slots?
Per the link to the picture of my cellar (if that works, not easy to get an image to work on this forum), I have 12 columns that, due to dividers in the rack, could be naturally divided into 2, 3 or 4 vertical sections. So “Bin 1” could be the whole first column (21 wines), split into two (12 and 9 wines), three (6, 6, and 9) or four (6, 6, 6 and 3). What is a good number of wines per bin?
I could, of course, test it out first, but I need to load up the rack and need the storage schema for the entries into Cellar Tracker, not to mention that I want to label them and am considering ordering 1” x 2” brass plates off Etsy like these Hand Punched Brass or Aluminum Numbered Tags Custom Numbered - Etsy and so I am trying to work out what plates to order.
In my experience you can safely make bin sizes fairly large. I have one bin that is 250 bottles (most are around 70 bottles). When you use cellar tracker and your cellar for a while you will discover that you become very familiar with which wines reside in which bins and where they are located in the bins. If your photo shows the whole cellar I would use a maximum of 4-5 bins.
I do letter and number like a grid and track it in CT that way. Each bin just one bottle. I don’t buy 6 and 12 counts of really nice bottles, so it makes more sense since each slot would have something different anyway.
I have X bins on the other wall that I simply assign the whole X as a designation. In that case it’s holding 40 or so bottles, but it’s not too bad to keep track of as these are my weekday wines that I do usually get 6 or so of and then they’re all together.
Not perfect, but best to pick a system, document it, and stick with it.