Fun exercise: you can only access a fraction of your cellar for 6 months. What to choose?

For various reasons, my husband and I are selling our current house about 6 months before the new one we are building will be ready for moving in. In the interim, we’ll be living in a temporary apartment situation. Now, at the end of the line, the new house will have room for all our wine onsite (currently we have two different storage facilities in addition to the home cellar), which is very exciting; but, needless to say, the apartment will not have a real wine cellar, just the medium sized Eurocave we’ve been using for overflow. So this week we’ll be moving all the wine currently in our house – a reasonably large amount – into storage for the next 6 months. Of course, neither of us is planning to go dry for that whole time, which means we need to figure out what to bring to tide us over until, let’s say, the end of November.

I’ve been going over inventory trying to plan for what we might need or just want, knowing we have significantly reduced space. It’s proving a tougher task than I thought it would be, but it’s also been fun to think about. Curious to hear what others would do in the same situation – if you had to limit yourself to a fraction of your cellar, but wanted to cover your needs for 6 months? I realize that, for those who only open a bottle or so a week, this would probably not be much of an exercise. We are regular drinkers, though, used to opening a bottle nightly and 2-3 a day on weekends. And, while there is always the safety net of going to the liquor store on the way home if we find ourselves lacking, we do live in PA, where that’s less of an appealing option

Interested to hear!

Why can’t you make pulls from storage during those 6 months?
How many bottles does the Eurocave hold?

Because my offsite storage was in a different city from where I lived, I had been living with this situation for years. In my case, I kept wine at home that was ready to drink (some newer, more older) and constituted a representative cross-section of my collection. Sometimes I would run out of a type of wine and, if I wanted another, I would have to buy it. I also kept some wine that I knew friends would like. In some ways it was easy for me because the majority of my collection is still in the process of aging (I tend to like wines with some age on them), so I could move bottles to home as they came into their (my) drinking window. I believe that you have more ready-to-drink wine in your collection (you buy more older wines at auction than I do), so that selection method might not work as well for you.

We can, technically, but storage is nowhere near home and it is quite expensive to get things to Philly from storage. Plus it can’t be done on the spur of the moment. Finally, much of the wine in storage will be on wrapped pallets, and therefore not accessible.

The Eurocave holds about 150 bottles.

I’m less looking for advice on how to approach the task than I am simply interested in what others would choose.

It’s reality for me living here. We can bring five bottles a head each trip. So I have around 100 or so bottles, my first mistake was to only bring the best stuff and never drink it. Now I focus on what I will actually drink.

My biggest concern would be “special occasion” wines. I would probably look at the calendar to see what events/milestones would be coming up, then pick special bottles I would like for those occasions. Other than that I would simply make sure to have enough daily drinkers to tide me over (and anything I thought was in imminent danger of fading, but that may not be too much of a concern since it’s only six months).

By the way, I would probably also allow an additional three months or more for unplanned contingencies since your home is under construction.

Good luck, and congratulations!

For a Philadelphia summer I’d keep mostly whites - Riesling; Chenin; Muscadet; maybe some Chablis. Perhaps you can buy rose as needed (PLCB is less bad there than for other varieties) to save some room for lighter reds - beaujolais and (of course) red burg. Finally, bubbles are de rigeur.

Perhaps easier to say what to sock away - ‘winter reds’.

This seems painfully obvious and therefore of dubious value. I look forward to seeing others’ answers.

Sarah, because I assume your six month period starts imminently, make sure you overweight for rose’ (which I just realized is the exact opposite of what Kevin is saying, but so be it) and Champagne. And you probably already know this, but right over the Ben Franklin bridge you’ve got places like Canal’s where it’s easy enough to select a mixed case to augment your Eurocave inventory with some interesting shtuff.

Everyone keeps saying this, many with some barely hidden glee: “Oh you just wait - it’s going to take MUCH longer and cost MUCH more than you think!” I’m getting tired of it. It makes me wonder how terrible everyone else’s contractors must be…Not your fault, Xavier. You’re just about 100th person to feel they need to tell us this, and it’s getting old.

Fortunately, we are blessed with being right on schedule and right on budget. AND we are not so naive as to have failed to pad the timeline already. We are moving to temporary housing not because the new house is taking too long, but because we agreed to leave the old house early.

Right with you Bob - three cases of rose and three of champagne off the bat. :slight_smile:

We know we’ll have to reload at some point. It’s a fun game to play with your inventory and consumption history, though, seeing what you actually drink over particular periods. I was surprised to see some of the things we go through faster than I thought we did.

Since I only have about 300 bottles in my collection, and only about 1/3 is even ready to drink, this is pretty straight forward for me. I’d grab some subset of the reds (predominantly Cabs, Pinots, and Zins) that are ready to go, as well as a couple of the Chards.

If I was planning to not have access for only about 6 months, that would only amount to 30-50 bottles as I only drink 1-2 “nice” bottles per week. For everyday sparklers, whites, and roses, I’d keep doing what I do now - load up once a month or so from my favorite retailers. Storage for these isn’t an issue so whatever didn’t fit in the Eurocave I’d have no problem keeping at room temp.

I drink mostly based on the food I’m eating & the time of year. So I’d take only 3-6 big reds like a Tuscan Merlot or WA Syrah…I’d bring more whites & sparklers w/ some Rosé. I’d choose 6 “special” bottles from a range of styles so I always felt like I had enough to cover special occasions. I’d have 1-2 cases of wines I expected to drink anyway based on summer & holidays.

I would take the opportunity to “cleanse” my collection and not move to storage the stuff I have been meaning to drink. Lord knows I have a boatload of these wines to get through! Be an easy way to update my inventory as well.

Good luck with your contractor - I am a home builder and I finish my projects on time and on budget so I attest that it can be done!

This happens to me every summer. I have a bunch of wine I keep in the cold part of my basement (outside the glacial cellar), but during the summer I put all those boxes in the access aisle of my cellar. So from May-September I can only drink what I can reach from the door of the cellar. It’s an eclectic mix, but limited.

Might be old, but it is usually true.

I would have a mix of varieties so you won’t get bored, some old, some new, but leave wines you know are super tannic and meant for further aging out of the mix. Ready-to-drink wines that you have? Sure, pull a few cases of them but also make room for some older Burgundy, some Rhones (both N&S), perhaps drink some of these wines you might have bought on a lark but haven’t found the time to drink yet - now is the perfect time. If you run out of ‘daily drinkers’, you can always purchase these as needed and locally.

New house? Sounds fun.

If 150 bottles isn’t survivable for 6 months, there’s bigger problems than contractor delays. neener [stirthepothal.gif] Why don’t you select 150 bottles that you want to get rid of? That makes room for others that you might desire more when you have the space in the new house.

3 cases of Riesling, 1 case of Cab, 1 case of Burgundy, and a few bottles of Port would do quite well for my wife and I for that span. Actually, we’d probably have left overs.

There’s always a wine shop nearby or willing to ship if you’re in danger of getting dehydrated.

That said, I’d be fine with rose, crisp whites, champagne and a case of red burgs to get me through the last few weeks when the weather turns cooler.

I went through a very similar scenario for a move last year.

  1. I ID’d things not ready to drink/things to keep my hands off of and stored those first. I catalogued what was in each box in case I had to pull something from storage - at least I’d know which case to pull.

2). I identified ‘drink now’ and ‘drink soon’ bottles and kept them out. I tried to have some bottles in each category I own still reachable, with those that were most ready teed up to be next.

  1. if you give wine as gifts often, keep those handy too unless you plan to buy those in the interim.

What I actually kept available was a lot of burg, Riesling, Cali pinot, Nebbiolo, with just a few bottles of stuff I drink less like cab, bdx, sweet wines etc and just lived with having only the ‘most ready’ bottles within reach.

If reduction of your holdings is not a goal, it’s a good time to get some of your supply from things you’ve been meaning to buy more of.

I don’t think I understand the concept of “wine I want to get rid of,” since I only buy wine I’m excited to drink. But then I also don’t understand the use of the nominative case as the object of a preposition.

We probably wouldn’t drink 150 bottles in 6 months, though it certainly could happen. But it’s not about having enough juice (yeah, I do, in fact, realize that wine shops exist and some even deliver to PA), it’s about putting together a sub-set of my own cellar, within the given restrictions, that is broad and deep enough to meet my expected needs and desires. It was really fun for me to do - looking back at that same period over the last few years in CT and seeing what we drank, both numbers and categories, then thinking about how this year might be the same or different. I thought it might be fun for others.

First,

This exercise is not fun!! I am living it right as I relocated x-country to a home without a cellar. My entire cellar was shipped professionally and held in storage until I build a cellar.

My approach was to BUY more wine that was drinkable now (back vintages, etc.), keeping those in a small offsite until my cellar is ready.

It is very frustrating to have what you want to drink, but not be able to access it…