I recently took delivery of a wine cabinet that can hold approximately 500 bottles (see below photo). Does anyone have any ideas for keeping the bottles organized? I started filling randomly and that’s obviously not a long-term strategy. Do I just group by region/variety and accept that I will have to poke around a bit?
I like Cellar Tracker for cellar management. I give each “section” a name (for you, that might be just “Left Door” and “Right Door.” Then I give each row a bin number from top to bottom. So “Right Door 2” would be the second row from the top in the right door. I use hang tags for my bottles (like this https://amzn.to/49viLDi ) which makes it easy to find the bottle I’m looking for once I’m on the right row.
Be sure and use CellarTracker to identify where each bottle is located and then it really doesn’t matter how you place where each goes.
That’s 1/10th of the fun!
Yeah, I do put them in as “row-column” when I label their location.
I try to group by country, appellation, and vintage, in that order. I don’t generally put the same producer next to each other, because I have more single bottles than say 6 to 12 of a producer over multiple vintages.
I have a locker filled with boxes, so it’s a lot more difficult to see what’s where. Roughly, I have a section for white/bubbles, a section for near-term reds, and a section for reds that I won’t open for at least 5-10 years. It’s a bit more complicated than that now, but that’s still my rough layout, and it works quite well, as long as I organize everything about once a year. Region seems fine too with a cabinet like this, where it’s really easy to just look and see what’s there. You’ll get really good at identifying wines by the tops of the capsules.
I generally set up my wine cabinet based on drinkability, top shelves are for wines that I want to drink soon, lower shelves are for wines that are either waiting to move to off-site or are ready to drink but are more special occasion wines. I tend to group my shelves by white vs. red as well. One of my main goals was to have it organized so that my partner is comfortable pulling bottles out without having to ask me, so she can pull from the top three shelfs without an issue.
Organization of a wine fridge? LOL!!! What a luxury! My “organization” is strictly based on maximizing number of bottles within the unit.
I keep my wine fridge organized with red on left and white on right. Riesling is top right. Bubbles are in the top section. In general I keep the longer term or special bottles at the bottom and ready to drink at the top. Obviously when it’s really full and I get something new, it goes where it will fit. I have individual slot QR labels for CT so I always know where things are. A-L for columns and 01-20 for rows. They are two deep, but it’s not hard to find the bottle in back if it’s not in front.
Every month or two when it’s fairly empty and I need to refill from the offsite, I reconcile with CT inventory and remove bottles I forgot to scan and then move bottles around to where they should be. Over time the longer term holds migrate to the bottom where they belong. With a tall unit, the bottom section is naturally a few degrees cooler - around 54 vs 60 for me - so better for longer term storage.
I have the same type of 2 door cabinet and put my labels in CT as row/column with 1 letter for row followed by 2 digits for column; eg A01, A02 etc left to right for the top row.
Using two digits for the numbers has been really useful because CT uses alphabetical sort. With only one digit, A11 would have been listed before A2.
I realize though that it would have been much better to order things column/row rather than row/column because each row is split across the two doors. When I do my annual inventory fix-up, I have to keep switching between the left and right doors because the sort by bin goes left to right rather than top to bottom. It would be much easier to go down the columns and not have to switch doors again and again. The fix would be to make the columns go A,B,C and the rows go 1,2,3.
I’ve done the same, but invariably with time my organization gets more chaotic and so I generally discover that I must rely on where CellarTracker informs me everything is located.
Initially you’ll be able to do rows or columns of regions, years, varietals, etc; but as you fill it and then add in more bottles it will literally be wherever there is a slot your bottle will call home.
Hahaha! There is no right answer! You will always struggle to find your bottles and reorganize. It’s part of the game. Enjoy the process, wine fridges are necessary mofos 
Congrats on the new wine frig! How did you organize before? I always tell people to organize their collection based on what makes sense for them, and their use of their wines. Mine is organized (loosely) by variety, producer, then vintage. But it has evolved over ~15 years as my tastes have changed and cellar, and it’s locations have grown.
I also organize by how likely I am to drink them.
Bottles I don’t want to touch for a while go on the bottom.
100% this. Earlier drinkers eye level and longer term down low.
Or, with the double doors, it can be “hold” on the left side and “drink” on the right
Pretty basic but makes it easy for me to find out what I want to open on CellarTracker and then know exactly where the bottle is.
I also tend to keep my nicer bottles toward the outside in case the cooling unit freezes up and drips.
I have a smaller unit a 264 bottle Le Cache.
I lettered across the rows A-G and then numbered down 1-15, So: LC_A14 would be in Le Cache first row A, 14th bottle down. The shelves are double deep and I don’t bother with that position
Before I kept my wine in offsite lockers, which I will be maintaining, though I hope to go from 3 → 2. As for my organizational style, it’s absolute chaos.
