I’m curious as to whether people generally put their house wine(s) through their cellar inventory (if they have such). Ive gone both ways on this; with our recent kitchen reno we now have a somewhat larger wine 'fridge in the kitchen (50 odd bottles). For me the problem is not so much keeping up to date for the arrivals as for the departures !
[Im thinking of wines that are inexpensive (whatever that means to you), bought in relatively large quantities and not aged significantly - keeping “good ordinary claret” 7 - 10 years does need some inventory control]
Good question. I almost never do. Much of this type of wine falls into those I buy from Full Pull and they don’t make it into CT. The “trigger” for me is if I take any of them to the offsite storage locker. Many of those don’t and stay, instead, in my “drink now” slots in the kitchen.
A particular problem (if I can call it that…privileged life acknowledged) is when I buy lots of the same wine, but vintage in and vintage out, and have them in CT. I open/drink a few for a gathering or something, but have no clue which vintage it was. This is mostly a problem with whites. I then have to fish them out of the recycle bin and check. So, I stopped putting them into CT altogether.
I generally enter any bottle I buy or am gifted into CellarTracker. The (rather large) exception to that is wines that we have made or other homemade wines given to us. I haven’t made any wine in a few years, but did for about a decade from purchased fruit and vineyard we planted. I tried entering those for a while, but it quickly became unmanageable, so I deleted what was in there, and now if we drink one it goes unrecorded.
Cool question. As a practice, whatever goes into the cellar, it goes into Cellartracker. And for me, I don’t differentiate daily drinker versus not. If it’s in the cellar, it’s available to drink, and whatever I do have is all kept in one wine cabinet here at the house. Yeah, some stuff in the cellar is probably better suited for my blind tasting wine groups but I’m not against opening anything if the moment says ‘open it!’.
This is quite a quandary for me. I am trying to avoid “house” wines as I have more “fine” wine coming in than going out. I’m trying to drink down my cellar as I’m tired of holding wines too long waiting for that perfect moment. I’ll then come across some house wine deals that are hard to pass up. These “house” wines I know won’t last long so is it worth the time to put them in Cellartracker and make a tasting note? So then I’m back to square one not drinking down the cellar and gathering more wine.
One idea I had when I was putting everything in CT was to simply photo the empty bottles before recycling. Poor follow through resulted in rather cluttered camera roll and not much improvement in cellar accuracy.
BTW I dont do bar coding or have a reader - If I did then maybe everything not consumed on day of purchase would go through CT.
I record them in CT mainly to track purchases/consumption - i.e., how much am I buying and drinking.
I’m not great (and that my wife drinks a lot of these herself) at logging consumption, which means I just go zero out some wines when I realize CT says I have a few bottles but there are none actually in the cellar.
We record everything. I’d argue that I need house wines in CT even more than I need higher end purchases, because they go so quickly and easily that I need to have a record to look at to let me know when to reload. This way, when I pull/delete a daily drinker, I’ll see if I only have 2 or 3 left and should buy more, which I’d never keep track of in my head. If I only have a couple of something, I don’t often forget how many are left.
We pick up a fair amount of $20-25 sparkling wines from Last Bubbles for casual drinking that don’t require much attention, these are our “house” wines and don’t get entered into cellar tracker. All the other “more serious” wines get tracked.
Not put into inventory tracking. Wife and I have lived within an AVA and worked in the industry for 20-30 years. As a result we get many local wines either given to us or purchased at an industry discount. These wines are primarily weekday drinkers or just given to our two daughters for their consumption. Will say the one exception is Turley, although we do drink them sooner than later. Our way of keeping them all separate is based on an additional Vinotemp unit used just for daily drinkers. Helped the organizational anxiety of keeping CT tracking accurate.
I like to put everything into my cellar inventory, because I like to track buying and consumption data over time. It’s interesting and, as I get older, useful, to see how much I actually drink, and correlate it with health.
Also, I can’t keep myself honest about spending if I don’t track it all. Perhaps that’s a benefit to not tracking daily drinkers for some
When I had a single house wine that I could buy cases of at anytime, I did not inventory it and when I got low I just placed another order. These days it’s not that easy to get more of just anything, so I don’t have just one house wine. So everything is in inventory.
I put everything into inventory except for single bottles that I want to try soon to see if I want to buy more. But I do not have any “house wines” according to your definition.
