Time to inventory the cellar again!

Spent the rainy day today indoors doing my annual cellar inventory.
Total number of bottles went up by 54. Had to delete 81 and add 135 that I had not kept track of. I haven’t been very good at keeping my CT up to date. At least it’s good for today!

How about you?

Keeping a totally accurate cellar inventory has been my New Year’s resolution for about 8 years running, but never accomplished. I’m getting to the point I just don’t care any more! I also am thinking of my cellar less as an asset to be valued, but instead just to be enjoyed as I age and it shrinks.

Being able to find anything is my main reason for doing it. I get tired of wasting 10-15 minutes searching for a wine because I don’t have my ducks in a row.

It’s nice to know exactly what I have but in the end, I usually find something to drink anyway. Then after I drink it, I know I don’t have it any more so everything kind of keeps track of itself.

I did my inventory a couple of months ago. Lost more than I gained. My offsite lockers are tight because I have boxes of 12 and easy to see if my report shows, say, 11 or 13 in a box in error. As for onsite, that is tricky but I don’t keep much onsite. Where I have a problem is my pending list in CT. When I order, I put it in pending. But sometimes I am not allocated the wine or the vendor doesn’t get back to me. Then I have a pending that I never bought probably. So when shipping season arrives I have to reconcile my pending with the shipment and come up short. So then I need to see if it was charged on my VISA or not… argh.

I typically don’t have to do an inventory. My list is kept on an excel spreadsheet. I used to mark off on a printed copy I kept in the cellar any bottle I removed, and listed every bottle I added. Now I just keep a pad in the cellar and list each added and removed wine. Every month or two I sit down at my computer and update the excel spreadsheet. Takes maybe 10-15 minutes. The key, of course, is to have the discipline to never allow yourself to remove a bottle without taking the 10 seconds to write it on the list…otherwise you are forced into the painful process of doing an inventory! Since I don’t always feel like listing every wine I add to the cellar when I bring a couple of mixed cases in, if I unpack them I stand them up on my counter and NEVER put any bottle away into a rack without listing it. What I have not done is put my inventory on CT or go to a barcode system.

As to finding wines, I have about 2400 bottles but most of it is in a type of individual bottle racking made for me where you can see the labels (the bottom layer of bottles on each shelf have their labels facing you, and there is a layer behind resting on them and facing the other way, but these are generally “repeats” of the same wine that they are resting on, if that makes sense. The rest of the cellar are case bins. My cellar is organized by type and vintage, so I can pretty much find what I am looking for pretty easily. I could certainly number my shelves and bins and note that on my spreadsheet, but with being able to see most of the labels and knowing about where to look, it had never seemed that important.

Anyway, works for me. I am sure there are better systems out there. But several years ago I got lax and lost track and had to do a complete inventory. After that painful experience I have stuck to being disciplined about writing down what I remove and add.

I don’t bother putting in what I order until it arrives anymore for the most part unless I don’t trust the seller or it’s futures that i want to make sure I document.

I don’t have a home cellar, so I dont usually have much that’s in the Ready to Drink tonight mode unless I stop by Domaine. Everything there is in cases and I just make sure I document what I take out. With the small number of “active bottles” it makes it easier to log if I forget to do so the night I drink the bottle.

Still, despite careful inventory, I have a bunch of case boxes with 11 in them deep in the locker. Not going to bother spoiling the surprise with another inventory until I build a cellar at home and move some wine in.

I try to do that every few years. Its always fun to find a few. The hard part is trying to determine where i drank some of them. Good thing I keep notes on 90% of them and most of the wines I don’t are cheaper wines I drink late or give to my wife for her book club.

Same here. I never saw the value in it.

If I didn’t put in purchases until they arrived, I’d forget about a ton of things. The “Pending Deliveries” report is one of the most useful functions for me. In spring and fall, when I start looking to ship, I don’t know what I’d do without it. Some merchants will reach out and ask if I’m ready to ship, but many will not. I have forgotten about purchases I didn’t enter in CT for years in the past. Plus, it’s very helpful to know how much is outstanding so I can make decisions about whether to ship to the house or storage.

Agreed. I plug my new purchases in as pending deliveries on the day I place my order.

This is exactly what I do.
Works like a charm…

TTT

I keep a purchases email folder.

So do I, but there are a lot of emails in there, and it’s a time consuming pain to go searching through that folder to add up how many cases might be ready to ship at a given time. As opposed to CT, where I can see with one click how many total stores have wine for me, and how much is coming from each.

I am not trying to talk you into anything, you just said you didn’t see the value. It think the value is abundantly clear. Whether you want to avail yourself of it is up to you.

I track my bottles religiously using CT. I find any deviation between what CT says I have, and what my wine storage website says I have or what I see in my wine fridge at home, to be deeply unsettling.

What is this word “discipline” that you speak?

It was a relief to move everything to open storage at Mana Wine and have them inventory everything. Unfortunately they did not turn up the bottle of 1971 Les Forts de Latour which I’ve been looking for for the last 8 years or so.

I did discover that a case belonging to one of the people I shared the cage with ended up with my cases so I’ll be handing that off some time soon once all the moving dust settles.

+1.

As for cellar, I did an inventory about a year ago. Found a few things I needed to ‘presume drunk’ but not enough to make me want to go to the effort more frequently than every few years.

I’m pretty diligent about CT, but I know things fall through the cracks sometimes. We plan to do a full inventory and bar code, if I have anything to say about it, when we bring all the wine in house after the house/cellar is done. I expect to find a 2-3% net swing based on things that were consumed without entering, that were never entered in the first place, or which were entered incorrectly. It will be extremely time consuming, but I am sort of looking forward to it. There are hundreds of bottles I’ve never even seen, as they went to storage directly upon purchase and have been there for years.