How do you organize your cellar?

WINE TALK
41

Not sure what is this varietal thing you’re talking about… for the moment my active cellars are a bit messy, although one is dedicated to Champagnes so that helps. The second is all the “great” stuff, and it’s very messy but since these bottles need to sleep for a long time it’s no big deal.

The passive cellar is better organized, with racks becomenig more and more dedicated when it comes to my favorite regions. So I start with a “foreign reds” rack and a Bordeaux rack… then Alsace, German rieslings… then Chateauneuf, misc Cote-Roties, Chablis, CdB… and when it comes to CdN (or Jamet) it’s one rack per producer at least, sometimes more.

Everything is organised in CT, at least by rack number and quite often even which row in a rack. I still somehow manage to find bottles I didn’t even know I had, especially in the active cellars.

42

mine is a chaotic half-assed attempt at sorting by grape.

43

Honestly, I’m shocked by the responses. I really did think everyone used CellarTracker. Like Frank, no organization whatsoever is neccessary if you use CT. My offsite is listed by Locker number and case A thru …

My 600 btl Americave at home is numbered 1-19 vertically and A-N horizontally. I put a bottle wherever there is there is space and enter it as, for example: 3-b r. Third row down, second row across, rear bottle. The front and rear is unneccesary but I do it anyway.

My default CT home page is sorted first by location (storage or cellar), then by varietal, then by producer. If I want a Pegau with dinner, only a trip to the PC is neccessary to search for it. Then I can go directly to the bottle.

Like instant replay in baseball, if the technology exists, why not use it?

44

To be honest… size does matter.

45

Size is not important, it’s how big it is.

46

?? Maybe not a lot by some standards, but I’m unemployed so I’m happy to have it until my situation improves.

47

I was just trying to make a semi-joke, sorry if this came across as a personal comment. It’s just that when I had a few hundred bottles in the cellar, I knew all of them by heart, price of purchase, etc. Chaos grows with numbers (and years) as far as I’m concerned, I can only imagine how hard it is to stay organised for people with several thousands of bottles across several locations.

48

Like instant replay in baseball, if the technology exists, why not use it?

I assume that was tongue in cheek? By the same logic, you could organize your underwear with a similar system - stained on the right, clean on the left, questionable in the middle, and so on. Or the nails and screws and tools in the basement. But really, for a few hundred or a thousand bottles, and even more if much of it is in full cases, it’s not necessarily worth the effort.

Mine is slightly above random - I know that about a quarter or so is Spanish and that’s mostly at one end, whites in general are across the aisle, Italy is recognizable by the strip on the capsules, Beaujolais is near the bottom because I made the slots bigger there, Hungary is probably up near the top because their bottles are strange, and so on. The bottle of Burgundy is on the right and I know exactly where because I keep wondering if I should drink it. It’s only 2000 bottles or so and I can roughly figure it out.

There’s technology but it’s completely besides the point in terms of value added. And maintaining any kind of system is way beyond my personal interest because if you don’t invest the additional and ongoing time recording what you drank, it becomes useless. I don’t want to obsess over a collection and spend time organizing and thinking about it - I just want to have stuff to drink.

If I had a store or restaurant or some kind of commercial establishment, that would be an entirely different thing. But every vendor has some kind of inventory management system and while you could adapt those for home use, it’s just not necessary. And that’s NOT a knock to anyone who thinks about it differently and uses some kind of technology for whatever purpose. It’s just an explanation of why one may not choose to do so. Different strokes. Cheers

49

I use CT. I look at the list when it is just me. I use cor.kz to tell the wife where to pull a bottle for dinner. But, when friends are over, we usually just go into the cellar and choose something, and that is where a little organization is good. I sometimes am embarrassed to hand over a 20 page list and ask them to choose something. Face it, our obsession is not everyone’s passion-though it should be.

50

It is all in Cellar Tracker, but now that the collection is pushing a 1000 bottles, the actual cellar is only semi-organized at best. Passive cellar - Two racks for domestic, two racks for french/italian/spanish/german/australian, one cooler for the best bottles (mixed bag)and champagne, but with the racking full lots of cases stacked on the floor and those are utter chaos.

51

removed.

52

The subject of cellar organisation is for me like the Loch Ness monster : unapproachable.

I had several cellars in several places, and one day, some 7 years ago, I decided to create a new cellar to put together all my bottles. I decided a size which should allow me to be quiet for more than ten years.
The idea was so :

  • one room for the incoming wines, to be placed in a proper storage
  • a second room with only empty bottles, where I have a huge table, where I could receive friends to drink wine. As I have kept thousands empty bottles, just for memory, in this room I keep the greatest memories. It is rather impressive for my visitors,
  • three room of storage
  • one room for empty packing, to use “in case”.

This general format has been kept. But the storage is a nightmare. I put bottles everywhere.
And when I pick one bottle, I never put the information on a file.
So, I do not know what I have and where it is.

It means that when I want to plan any dinner, I go and wander in my cellar, picking in the places to find what is appropriate for what I want.

One day, some 3 years ago, I have used a friend of mine, a sommelier who was jobless, to organise my cellar. He did a rather good job in making the cellar presentable. The nice bottles could be seen, and it had a nice look. In every case (one case can contain roughly 40 bottles) he put a paper with the content, but as I take a bottle without ever taking note of what I take, this became rapidly hopeless.

This year, as I had another friend, a wine merchant, who was jobless, I asked him to find in my cellar the bottles which need urgently to be drunk. And he created cases with bottles to open very soon. But as he moved many bottles, now I do not know any more where are some bottles that I cherish.

So, there is no solution.

The work of this friend has had positive and negative effects.
One negative effect is that he found many bottles having low fills that I need to open soon.
One positive effect is that he found bottles that I did not remember. One day he said : “do you know this ?”, as he had found in a hidden place three Romanée Conti 1961.
At this point of my experience, I consider that I will never know what I have, whatever I do.
But as I still drink a significant number of bottles of my cellar, I can live with that.

To add to this testimony, I have created a cellar near my house in the south of France. And the volume is huge, but the number of bottles, for the moment, does not exceed 1,000 / 1,500.
Even in this cellar, obviously easy to handle, I do not know what I have.

So, my case is desperate. [head-bang.gif] [help.gif]

And in a way the fact to have no real knowledge of what I have does not displease me. [basic-smile.gif]

53

Francois, if you ever want to know, the next time you have an unemployed friend have him or her slap barcodes on your bottles. Youll have them employed for a long time, and all you will have to do to keep track is run the bottle past a scanner before you take it out of the cellar :slight_smile: Difficult but not hopeless.
PS someone said something about not using CT. I use CT to know what is in the cellar, I just dont put a location in. With only about 1200 bottles, I can find whatever Im looking for and I cant physically fit anymore than that so no danger of growth :wink:

54

All my wines are listed on an Excell spreadsheet, I soon stopped listing each individual bottle location by slot number as the spreadsheet became too big to be easily printed. Instead I make sure all the bottles of a particlar wine are stored together on the same row of a rack and just list that location. Thus B11 means all the bottles of that wine are located in rack B row 11, and they are easy to find.

In the spreadsheet I have colums that include location, wine name, vintage, number of bottles, variety, drink/hold, and weekend/daily quality.

I typically sort by drink/hold, variety, weekend/daily, vintage, wine name. Then it’s easy to print out only the wines that are ready to drink, in my case it’s just three pages, sorted by variety and by daily/weekend drinker.

I keep the three page printout in the cellar and it’s easy to pen edit the number of bottles as I remove them. Every month or so I update the spreadsheet in the computer.

55

I try to keep it organized by region but “organized” is a very lose term. I’ve been collecting sine the early/mid 90s. In my earlier years I was hugely heavy on Cali Cabs. Since then, my cellar has evolved in to about 1/2 French and I don’t buy that many Cali cabs anymore. So, as my tastes have changed so has the space allocated for those regions. So my organization is always changing. I’ve got a lot more wine from Piedmont and Burgundy than I ever thought I would 10 - 12 years ago. So, when one region growns another shrinks. I still make an attempt but if I don’t have enough slots in a certain region I’ll just stick the wine wherever it will fit the easiest.

I use Cellartracker so I can find the wine quickly even if it isn’t “organized”.

JD

56

Physical organization? Badly. I’m lucky if I have a shelf of whites alternating with a shelf of reds in the fridge and cellar. Luckily, with only about 375 bottles to manage, it’s not out of hand.

Virtually? OK. No CellarTracker–yet! But Excel spreadsheet has wine, $ and my estimated drinking window, plus additional info if it’s already been tabbed for e.g. dinner party or OL.

haere ra,

57

Loosely by racks. A full double deep rack for French, another for California, etc. And within a rack, in very loose alphabetical order. Since all racks are double deep, only the same wine goes into any given slot . . .

58

I generally organize by Country/Varietal. All my American Pinot’s are in one area, all my Burgs in another, Rhones in one area, Cali Rhones in another, etc.

Apparently I have been lax in keeping track of my wines. Did a cellar re-org today to get stuff out of the boxes and was missing 20 bottles ( 2 of which I accounted for via entering the wrong year as drank). Hope I enjoyed the other 18 various missing bottles; Pride, Bedrock, Windy Oaks, Stefania, Escaravailles, and Tablas Creek among others.

59

Pretty much like Eric, I (more or less) organize by region and then by producer. And all in CT, many barcoded (more all the time), etc.

Best,

Andrew

60

Eric LeVine can attest my cellar is reasonably well organized. I lose a bottle now and then, but I know where most wines are without a problem.

Wines are sorted by region. Within each region, wines are arranged by appellation and then producer. Older vintages are closer to the floor.