My advice, having had a 2000 bottle cellar put in by Mr. Kravitz (above) a few years ago is:
One hour of planning now on logging your bottles will translate to ten hours of pleasure later. My cellar layout is similar, but smaller, with double deep racking. Every slot has an exact location. 23-07-B is the 23rd column starting on the right, seventh row down, back slot.
1A. Make sure you log in every bottle. Forgetting to remove a bottle that you drink is not so bad if each slot has a designation, but forgetting to log in a bottle puts you on the road to cellar hell. If I forget to remove a bottle when I drink it,no big deal, because once I refill the slot, it shows up as (2) bottles in the slot in Cellartracker, and I can easily correct the error. Remove a bottle, refill the slot with a new bottle, and not log them out and then in mean the bottle is lost forever, or until you accidentally find it. The cellar floor is your friend until you can log in a bottle.
Do not expect that the layout of bottles now will match your consumption choices, so do not expect to fill the Pomerol columns with Pomerols. I even have Saxum bottles in my Burgundy columns. It doesn’t matter where a bottle is so long as you can find it instantly.
I’m glad that this works for you, but that sounds like WAY too much work for me to ever even try. I generally try to have wines from the same region in more or less he same portion of the cellar. Like, “Italy is usually in that corner over there, next to the riojas. Some longer-term agers are in OWCs over here by the door. But some are in that unplugged cabinet in that corner. And some are just slotted in where I had room to get them off the floor.”
Once or twice a year, when the major shipments arrive, I make a half-assed effort to re-jigger some stuff. Going full-ass would be too much like work, and it’s a hobby not a job.
Negative result: I sometimes can’t find a bottle I just know I have.
Positive result: I regularly discover bottles I had forgotten about.
Obviously, they do not teach what junior associates are for at big law firms.
Nothing like calling home during the day, telling my son or my wife “please go downstairs and get 21-09-F and decant it” and then coming home to a perfectly ready bottle of wine. Or, in reverse, my wife decides that she wants one of “her” wines (Black Sears or Scholium whites) while I am nowhere to be found (golf course) and she goes to Cellartracker, finds it and gets to drink exactly what she wants.
I was curious if everyone here had temp controlled spaces ? ( living in the north I may be less prone to High temp as it ( my passive) never goes above 68F)
My organization system is probably foolish: Sections by type (Oregon Pinot, Oregon Chard, White Burg, Red Burg, etc.) and then by Vintage. We have a fair number of visitors and I enjoy sending guests to the cellar to pick what they want to try.
After a month, its already a huge improvement over having everything off-site. In the move process I found 8 bottles that were surprises, 6 missing, and none broken - I’ll take that as a win.
Here are some of the stats: Roughly 12 x 24, 2x6 framing with closed cell foam insulation, exterior door (with a deadbolt), half-ton Wine Guardian split system. Racking is double-deep around the walls; the island in the middle is also effectively double-deep (back-to-back retail floor racks). Almost all single bottles of various sizes, with a couple of bins for flexibility (you can just see in one of the photos that I added bins to each end of the island, and the center section with all the vertical bottle holders and the display rack on top is mostly small bins). I also deliberately left the top unfinished so I can put odd-sized bottles on the tops of the racks. The flooring is cork tile, chosen because it has a little bit of give and it was on sale.
Like Jay, I use a grid system and keep everything on a spreadsheet - you can just see the gold tags on each column, which are sequential numbers I just ordered from an industrial supply shop. It’s going to take me roughly forever to get everything in there and logged, but there’s too much wine to just wing it (and once a spreadsheet is up and running, it’s much easier to do the in and out since you don’t have to worry about keeping things in any particular order and any open slot is as good as any other.
Sure. I looked seriously at CellarTracker at some point, and Eric and his team were super-helpful with things like conversions. The main thing that was an issue for me was having wines in different locations show up as multiple lines on the spreadsheet - if I had 18 bottles of something, it would show up 9+ times for each slot I had the wines in (whereas on my spreadsheet I often have something like “Dom[6] 23B 23C 23D 114R 117D 117Q” as the location code). I actually print my list and flip through it when I’m trying to decide what to pull (and also mark the paper copy and update the file once every week or two), and I found CellarTracker great for searching for individual bottles but less usable for the way I skim through my cellar. I’ve had the spreadsheet a long time, so updating it is really no more work than putting the bottles in anywhere else. The review integration is really cool and the thing I miss most - but I also find I don’t really look at reviews that often any more. Bottom line is that I think CellarTracker’s a great service and understand why people love it, but I found something that works well for me that’s (at least for me) just as easy or easier to use.
I was considering doing a spreadsheet years ago, then found CT. As they say the rest is history. I hit CT several times a day. I have downloaded Richard Sandler’s Excel version for a visual layout.
Paul that’s really interesting. I use CT but I don’t have every bottle in a specific location. Instead i use columns (in the cellar ) and rows (in the wine fridge). So I don’t encounter the problem you describe about bottles taking up multiple rows in CT
But I get how if you’ve got a large cellar and double deep racking my method wouldn’t work as well and that having individual locations blows up a lot of the CT reporting: Thanks for the explanation.
A bit hard to tell how the problem arose, but it seems like the conversion from spreadsheet to CT was creating undesirable duplication . . . it’s not a problem to have each bottle assigned a unique location, and then it will show up in a list as 6 bottles of Dom, one each each of those 6 locations.
I may not be explaining well, but seven bin locations is seven lines on the printout, which gets unwieldy when each slot is a maximum of two bottles. In my spreadsheet, each wine is one line, and the bin cell just has as many codes as it needs. At the time (now a couple of years ago), Eric was super-helpful in trying to figure it out and agreed CT just wasn’t set up the way I was doing it - which is fine.
The issue of multiple lines on a spread sheet exists, but to me it is 100% irrelevant. I think I have used the spreadsheet dump routine in CT three times in ten years, and that was when the multiple lines issue was helpful because it facilitated finding empty rear slots and other data entry errors. When I look for a wine myself, I do it on line. Every once in a while, when I invite people for a dinner party, I will use the print restaurant style wine list function and send them a pdf of my entire wine cellar and tell them to select what they want to drink. I would not want to send them an ugly spread sheet, and the restaurant style wine list groups all the bottles together regardless of location.
Great job. I’m about to launch a similar project in Northern Florida (Ponte Vedra in case anyone can recommend a contractor). Can I ask what the total bill came to? I’m really struggling between metal and wood. How did you reach your decision, and if it was cost, what was the differential? What online suppliers did you find the most helpful? I’d appreciate any advice, Paul, as you’ve pretty much nailed what I have in mind for one of my spare bedrooms!
I got pine racking from Wine Racks America after looking at a bunch of places. 4700 for the cooling system, 17.3k for the racking, so call it a little under $3/bottle for 90%+ individual slots rather than bins. Installed by my GC and HVAC guy locally as part of a much larger renovation. WRA does have a design service, but be careful - the design was just racks and walls, and they literally left nowhere to put the cooling unit (which I had to improvise with my contractor). There was also a fair bit of leftover material. They were very nice and helpful up to a point, but I didn’t get the sense that they actually get their hands dirty. The GC also screwed up some things, like installing some of the bottle supports (all of them are at 3.25", even though some of the columns are 3.75"), but the tolerances are fortunately pretty forgiving. In the end, it was all workable if you’re a little hands-on and have a crew that can improvise a bit.
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