When did you last inventory your cellar/collection, or at least a good part of it.

When did you last inventory your cellar/collection, or at least a good part of it?

I spent time Sunday just fixing the data entry errors in Cellartracker that were easy to find - like the 27 different individual slots that claimed to have two bottles in the same slot and one slot that claimed to have three bottle. Then I moved bottles from the waiting list (also known as the floor) into empty slots and entered those into CT. I started to check the accuracy of the entries to make sure that the wine that was supposed to be in the slot was actually there, but after 5 minutes I decided that was too boring and quit. When was the last time you did a serious inventory verification of you wine cellar to confirm that you actually have what your inventory claims you have?

I stopped entering purchases into CT recently and am happier for it. My “inventory” is looking through my Eurocave racks to get a feel for what’s still there before selecting a bottle. This may be more difficult if your inventory is closer to 10k bottle vs. 600.

Partly why I stopped doing an inventory was my tracking was always off, and it frustrated me being so detailed on the buying end only to not accurately track things on the consumption end.

I do mine annually, usually over Christmas/New year’s holiday. This past holiday I did it for first time in 3 years because I skipped for whatever reason. Horrible. I had been ROBBED of over 200 bottles. But it’s now accurate. I think.

I try to do it once a year. I end up pulling things and not ‘consuming’ them in CT. I forget and then wonder where that bottle is. Or I sometimes move things and do not remember to update CT. So once a year to confirm things. I also use an offsite where I tend to bury the boxes with the stuff for aging. So some rotation is usually in order for burying new bottles and retrieving things coming into a window for consumption. Am actually going to try to do this in March. Got a couple of lost bottles to find(or find that they are actually lost) and some new stuff to bury.

I’ve tried. Honest, I’ve tried.
So the answer is- never.

99% of my wine is offsite so it’s pretty easy for me to account for the wines that are at home.

Having wines in multiple houses caused me to develop a habit of fastidiously recording things in CT, otherwise it was a nightmare to remember which wines where were.

Printing barcodes have been key in ensuring I both record all wine that is coming in and consumption. I just snap a picture of the barcode of wines I open and then record the consumption in CT when I can

Two of my wife’s most dreaded words together are “wine audit”. It’s been probably two years, we are overdue for one…

We did a full inventory when we finished our home cellar construction and brought everything onsite in 2016. I doubt we’ll ever do it again.

Since then, we’ve been pretty rigorous about logging purchases, deliveries and consumption. Everything gets recorded, even daily drinkers, beer and whisky. The cellar is tidy, with everything in racks, bins or stacked cases, save for a few bottles standing up to drink soon. It would be hard for anything to get lost.

Of course we miss something every now and again, with the most common mistake being forgetting to log a bottle as consumed; but those mistakes usually get caught the next time we go to grab a bottle of the same wine and notice the discrepancy between CT and the racks. This is one of the many ways in which I find having an organized cellar rather than one in which wine is spread out all over the place and assigned a slot code comes in handy - it’s much more obvious when a bottle is missing when you’re looking at the 4 racks that are supposed to be full and they are not. Anyway, I’d say we’re within a 5% margin of error at the most.

100% up2date all the time. I manage everything on my iPhone/iPad through VinoCell, certainly the most complete, useful and beautiful app out there, in my opinion. Every purchase and consumption is registered and it shows where every bottle sits (cellar/location, rack, excation position). At first I no system but with the collection growing and growing I had to change to a more organized system. Was a bit of an effort to catch up and enter all the wines into the app but never looked back and quite happy with the system (and all the stats and search functions in the app).

When we moved our wine from my offsite to my home cellar last year, my wife made me an excel sheet with one tab per rack - makes it easy to see where everything is in the cellar and I can easily ctrl f to find something. I’ve been pretty good at keeping that up to date. My most recent inventory was actually earlier this week.

I would be shocked if we had more than one or two missing/extra bottles. We have 5 lockers plus wines at home, so if I didn’t stay on top of things it would be very difficult to find stuff.

May of 2019, I counted and notated the location of everything. I even entered the first two pages of it into Cellartracker. My CT inventory is so far off I’m not bothering again until I build new storage and all the locations and bin numbering change.

This pretty much describes me as well, including doing a hard inventory in 2016 as I was moving wine into my new cellar from my old one. And I am pretty good about entering purchases and consumption into CT. I organize by country and region and then within that ny year and try to keep all wines made by one producer (e.g., 2001 Selbach-Oster) together. Periodically when i go to pull a wine i should have multiples of i will note whether my count for that wine and that producer is accurate.

Vinocell looks interesting and looks so much cleaner than CT. Might have to check it out.

I usually go through mine once per year. Actually started last night before I saw this thread.

I need to be more disciplined with removing/adding bottles in CT.

A month ago. Used to have over 1,000 bottles but new philosophy is keep around 250. I can always buy more wine if needed.

I picked the first one but I don’t enter my bottles by slot (as per the OP) so I guess it’s not as fastidious to keep up to date. I identified a few “bins” in CT (for wooden cases and such) but otherwise I just have a general organization of my cellars by region/country. So yes, pretty rigorous in my CT utilization but not as specific as others.

About once a week. Not the off-site stuff, which I assume doesn’t change unless I visit it.

This is exactly how I do it. VinoCell is extremely flexible. I’ve got a mixture of rack types and improvised boxes in various sizes and configurations in my cellar, not to mention the overflow under the stairs. VinoCell makes it easy and even fun to keep track of everything.

My memory is terrible - I indicated ‘within the past 5 years’ in the poll, but I now realize I did an inventory last May on 1/2 the cellar. Only 2 bottles unaccounted for in 2020.

I previously did a full inventory in March of 2019, which was a bit of an eye opener. The missing bottles (35 in total) were almost exclusively wines that had been brought to wine dinners outside my home. Apparently I’m good about recording consumption in CT when I’m home and opening it in my kitchen (when my phone is at hand), but less so when I’m taking it somewhere to be opened. Some of those were likely missing for minimum of 8 years, so previous to March 2019, I probably hadn’t done a full inventory since around 2010.
I’ve never not input purchases.

A very few bottles that were given to us as gifts get missed and are found during inventory, but only 2 or 3 in several years.