With my jazz playlist streaming in the background, I spent yesterday afternoon pulling out all of the wine from my home storage unit and reorganizing by shelf and producer. All in, around 300 bottles, including capacity for 30 bottles in our kitchen wine fridge. The remaining majority is offsite or sitting at places like Envoyer, awaiting shipment.
It was an interesting exercise and as dorky as it may sound, really got me in touch with the wine I have. It’s one thing perusing CellarTracker or a spreadsheet, but when you’re actually pulling out bottles and thinking about each producer, wine, where it should be stored (which rack), and when it should be consumed, it makes a difference. For example, ten bottles of a particular wine doesn’t seem like a lot when viewing as a number on my laptop, but when I had everything out on my office floor, it really brought into focus what I have too much of and what are wines missing from my collection.
Thought I’d share as encouragement to not be afraid to break down and reexamine your collection, especially during this time where most of us are homebound. And the added bonus of finding a few bottles I thought had already been consumed!
I went through our cellar about two months ago to do some arranging and to assign a location for each bottle in CT. It helped me realize that I no longer need to worry about keeping all one producer or region in the same cellar location and now my wife can more easily find bottles. I did find a few bottles I thought I had consumed and some I never entered into CT. I too found that I had too much of some producers and not enough of others, same for regions. My mailing list wines have reduced over the last couple of years and are likely to take another hit as I buy more from Europe.
I “reconnect” one a year when I inventory my cellar. An yes all of what you say is the byproduct of that inventory. I have become such a CT fanatic that I rarely find inventory disparities these days.
Thanks, Scott. I have wanted to this for some time and have been putting it off. I end up running downstairs to grab and go bottles as needed. And I have fallen into just unloading new bottles somewhat haphazardly.
You have inspired me to spend time reconnecting this week. I like it.
I did the same thing with 1 out of 2 of my Eurocaves. I did an inventory of my pinot noirs, and quickly realized I had way more 2017 than anything else and that has made me more focused to backfill 2015 and 2016. I tend to like California pinot noir best with 5 years of bottle age (if it’s not made by Arcadian that is!).
I also realized I’ve done a poor job of tracking consumption and instantly “lost” about 20 bottles (out of 400 or so). I’m also going to stop entering in rose and treat it like what I do with champagne, knowing my wife’s turnover rate on purchase to consumption is high enough to make the inventory tracking a burden for these.
Scott…Timely post. I did a bit of this last evening as organized 3+ cases of Turley…leading me to conclude that I need to start drinking up some Turley…and of course their release comes today and I’ll still buy some…offering a Rose.
Scott, like your spring icon; very seasonal! And yes, actually physically moving and looking at what you have can spur insights into what needs to get drunk faster and what areas supplemented.
I usually back shift my wines in my offsite once a year to push the newest releases all the way to the back and bring everything else closer to the front. As we’ve been drinking down bottles at home I am putting together a list of bottles to bring out of storage and restock the cellar.
I did the same thing this year when I finally broke down and moved to CT with the label printer and scanner. Was a good exercise and fun to see some of the bottles and was great to fix my inventory discrepancies, but the best part was the new system. I’m sold out to labels and will never go back!
I think most of you have much better cellar organization than I do, you would cry if you saw my cellar haha. After the new build is done I’ll have to take a few weeks off to figure out a system to organize it haha
I’m 95% at least accurate on mine, having been on CT for almost a decade now. But to take the bottles out of the slots, as bad as I had to scrape the labels going into the slots, to take them out again to only put them back might scrape everything off. It’s the downside to having a cellar that is 15 years old, but god bless that thing as it keeps on working summer after summer.
I like the jazz idea, Scott. I played through the entire Bill Evans Trio album called Explorations this week. What a bitchen piece of of work. What jazz do you listen to, Scott?
Scott, good list there. Some Blue Note stuff in there, too. My favorite artists have to be Bill Evans, Red Garland, Oscar Peterson and Kenny Burrell, who is probably my absolute favorite.
