As I seem to buy more than I drink at the moment, I had to invest in an additional wine fridge. Since I adore German Riesling and that’s very visible in my collection as well, I just spent the last two hours precariously trying to stack Riesling bottles.
I think these are by far the most visually appealing bottle types, but they’re really an enormous pain in the backside to stack… I may have exclaimed at some point I’ll stop drinking Riesling, which is blasphemy of course.
The Emrich Schönleber GGs were the worst, impossible to get any stability. Mixing producers on a shelf is an open invite for disaster as well.
And I just remembered the folks at Joh Jos Prüm sharing they’ll bottles their Auslese and above in a blue, longer bottle from the 2019 vintage onwards as well. I haven’t received mine yet, but am not looking forward to this as their current bottles are a (relative) joy to stack.
Anyway, rant over and if anyone has any great tips for doing this better I’m a taker.
I don’t think that would help. The problem I have (imagine the OP too) is if you to double stack (or more), the long skinny bottles just don’t stay together that well because the weight is distributed fairly evenly along the bottle so there’s not enough friction to keep them from moving, and they are so skinny it’s easy to end up with them falling in between each other.
I don’t really know the solution. All my Riesling at home I just stand up in my extra fridge.
I am struggling with the same thing and this is the only reason why I am not buying more Riesling. Only a problem with my wine fridge, not with my off site cellar but, alas, the latter one is damn near full at this point.
I’m saving all of my empties to build something out of them and I couldn’t agree more. While I dislike riesling and Champagne for this reason, I refuse to even buy some for this reason. I refuse to buy anything in this bottle:
Here is what I did when I had a wine fridge. I stacked a row of rieslings bottles with the bases at the back on the fridge. I then stacked the next row in the opposite direction (bases at the front). In order to maintain stability, I cut out small strips of cardboard from a wine box and placed it under each bottle in a bit of a “U” shape. Well actually the cardboard straddles the two necks and provides a landing point for the base of the bottle on top. I found that this basically eliminates the tendency for the bottles to wobble. I played around with the size and the thickness of the cardboard strips.
I have a section of my cellar with these modular racks:
These aren’t great for any bottles other than Bdx or riesling (assuming you’re trying to maximize your storage capacity within the room you have), because they only hold 4 bottles of those other wines per row, and they are much wider than they need to be to hold just 4 bottles. If they were just a touch wider and could hold five Burgundy bottles, they’d be much more flexible/useful overall, but that’s neither here nor there.
But for Bdx and riesling, as long as they are in traditional bottles, these racking units are just barely wide enough to hold five bottles per row, so you get almost optimal “storage density” for the amount of wall space you use, at least in terms of width. You give up some density, of course, with the single bottle row height, but you have no stacking/tipping issues with the riesling bottles, and you get the ease of access that comes with only having one row of bottles per shelf.
Here’s the funny thing, though, about the Bordeaux bottles - even wines from other regions that are bottled in “Bordeaux shaped” bottles won’t fit five to a row. What is up with that? Do Barolo or Chianti or Rioja producers use slightly thicker glass or something? And of course there are the Bordeaux that have started bottling in non-traditional bottles (and there’s always been Haut-Brion), and they don’t fit five to a row either. But these units are great for riesling.
Because they were shipped via rivers (smooth journey!) they didn’t need punts. Hence the flat bottoms. I think the flat bottoms meant that they couldn’t be too wide, so they had to be thin and tall.
The last bit is just a guess and I’m sure someone else can better explain the tall and narrow shape.
The ultimate bottle and packaging comes from the Wachau. The cases from wineries like Knoll, Hirtzberger and Prager are a thing of beauty. A case of Austrian wine takes up considerably less room in storage than a case of anything else.
This might not help with stacking bottles, but helps immensely when stacking cases. My preference is always to leave the bottles in their original case, if possible.
![[winner.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/07ec25c9fd71159fe15d7f1ba5fad64e91238d0e.gif "winner"){kind=small}
