I’m sure I remember this question being asked before but searching on Eurocave brings up a ton of unrelated threads.
Thanks to the generosity of a friend who was getting rid of an old Eurocave I now have one purring away in my bedroom. So far, so good but now I’m mystified as to how I’ll ever find find anything in there once it’s full.
I never got a handle on this and spend a lot of time guessing where bottles are. I am meticulous with CT, so I know what I have, but I have no idea where I have.
Oh, you’ll definitely lose bottles in there. I have 2 that are not even that old and I’ve already misplaced things.
I generally try to organize by varietal/type/region on a single shelf with stuff to age in the back and stuff to drink in the front. Doesn’t always work out perfectly, but it’s close most of the time. So I have shelves full of Pinot, for example, and shelves full of BDX blends. Shelves full of Chard and shelves full of riesling/gewurz/ and other hock bottles. You get the drift.
I think keeping them located by lot/bin number in CT or wherever is destined to fail. You’ll just be moving things around way too much to make that work IMO. You could MAYBE keep them on a single shelf and log that if you don’t move things around a lot, but that has not worked for me.
I have a fridge with a bunch of slide out single shelves, one fixed single shelf, and two fixed shelves that can fit 2-3 stacked (all double deep). The sliding shelves I organize by region and generally put the better bottles in them. Overflow goes in the front rack of the shelf above or below. The fixed single shelf I put painters tape on the side of the fridge with bottle list. The 2-3 height shelves are for more daily-drinker types (and some mags), one for domestic one for europe. Not perfect but works for me.
The ease of locating a given bottle would seem to depend heavily on whether your cabinet is fully racked or just the basic three shelf configuration. If fully racked it’s easy - as noted above you just number each rack. It takes only a second to locate a bottle this way. If bulk stacked on just a few shelves, I know of no other solution than the same numbering system - it just takes far longer to locate a bottle. This is both because you don’t know where in the stack it is located and because you have to unload and reload the whole stack to get the bottle you want (because the bottle that you want is always at the bottom of the stack).
While you will have sticker shock when you see the price of the shelves, it is worth it. Consider it a blended all-in cost if you got a deal on the cooler itself.
I once used a bulk stack method in an offsite and it was a disaster. Apart from the time wasted chasing the bottles I wanted, I couldn’t come even close to maximizing storage because the varying bottle shapes and sizes meant that I really couldn’t stack more than 3 layers high (four if I pre-sorted for Bordeaux style bottles only. More than once I found myself holding back an avalanche of bottles caused by a riesling or fat pinot bottle in the mix.
I try to organize alphabetically; a-p stored in a large wine cabinet; r-z in 2 Eurocaves. This mostly worked until my purchases outran my refrigerated storage shelving…
I tried once or twice to organize my Eurocave when I had one, then gave up because I didn’t find it sustainable. When I moved things to remove a bottle, I couldn’t be bothered to move everything back to the same place, and when new things went in, I just put them where I could for the most part. Bottle size and shape, and wanting to maximize capacity and stability also meant I would sometimes be better off playing around with where things were a lot of the time. I would try to keep reds and whites separate, and to keep multiple bottles of the same wine together, but other than that, I just kept a vague idea in my head where things were. Nothing ever got lost for real.
I split each “row” into a bin, and then for each bin I add notes for bottle location. For example, I would have “Bin C, bottle f2-1”, which would indicate the 1st bottle on the 2nd level (since I stack multiple bottles in each row) in the front of the 3rd row.
I go by row A-H and position within the row in my LaCache ie, LC_A12 LaCache row A line 12. the wine is double deep but I don’t put a position on them.