Greeting follow cellartracker users. I’m very late to the party and only recently became an active CT user. I’m doing the whole barcode, which is terrific, but I do see where my system has a flaw - I’ve no way to track slots I’ve opened up when I scan a wine out. How do you track what slots you have available to you? or do you even bother?
I don’t bother. When I am putting away new bottles, I can visually see what the free slots are, and just randomly choose one. I guess it might be nice to track free slots to know how much room I have left, but I know how many bottles I have space for, so that’s easy math from the total inventory count.
Use bins. Depending on how granular you want to get you can either set up a column as a “bin” or each slot as a “bin” (e.g., using a letter/number combo with columns running A-Z and rows running 1-xx).
FWIW, I have my “bins” set as 5-column-wide and 6 rows high (of 18 rows total on each rack). Gets me close enough. But everybody has different levels of particularity.
I do use a bin system. I have redwood double deep racks, so columns are numbered and rows are lettered, so a typical location might be: B21F, for row B, column 21, Front. This system works well, but how do I know bin B21F is free when I scan that bottle out, other than make a manual note of it (or visually, as suggested above, but that’s a tad more complicated with double deep racks)?
(I’m likely overthinking things)
I have double deep racks too, but my system is slightly simpler because I only use slots as bins, without distinguishing front vs. back. I figure if I know which slot it’s in, it’s trivial for me to see if it’s the front or back bottle, so making the CT record that granular adds some hassle without any real benefit. So then if a slot has only one bottle in it, I shove that bottle to the back so it’s immediately obvious that there’s room for another.
We know some people would like a way to pre-define their storage, capacities etc. and then be able to filter for empty slots. Alas, it is a large, deeply architectural change. It is on our todo list, but until I can grow the team (trying to hire a lot right now) something that will take a while.
Some forum users have built some pretty sophisticated spreadsheets based on our standard Excel webquery: Cellar Map - new spreadsheet
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I also use a slot as a bin. A00 down to Z99 if I had that many. I also don’t distinguish F vs B for simplicity. I can find the bottle - if it’s not in the front, it’s in the back.
However, to answer your question, when that slot is empty, that bin disappears from CT. It’s unfortunate, but not that unmanageable. You just can’t get a report of number of available slots. You just have to look at your racks to see what’s available.
I remember reading something on CT’s website about this question and they had a specific reason that bins disappear when there’s no bottles assigned.
I organize things much more strictly, so don’t have the same need, but I was thinking that if you group at least by region with a bunch of empty slots at the end of each region to separate it from the next and allow for expansion, then at least you’d only ever have to look in one place (i.e. the end of the Bordeaux section) for empty slots of the right type. Of course that would require a major overhaul if you’ve been doing it another way for a long time, but for those considering how to begin organizing, it’s a thought.
It only “disappears” from the drop-down pick menu, because at that point it doesn’t have a basis to know the bin “exists”.
One way to get a report is to go to “wine in my cellar” and then “summarize by location”. It will give you a list of all the bins in alpha order. You can print it and then see, for example, that there’s no A12, B3, B17, C6, etc. Or if you have multiple bottles (double deep or not slot-specific) how many bottles are in the bin. In my case I have 60/bin max so I know where spaces are (or if my inventory is off if it shows >60 bottles).
I used to do that but it was such a pain. Always moving tons of wine around every time I got a new shipment. Our having to keep a bunch of bins empty so you always have extra but then you can only use half your capacity.
I moved to the bin/barcode method specifically to be able to use every slot and never worry about moving things. Occasionally I’ll still move them if I originally had 6 of the same spread throughout open slots and then some new slots opened up so I consolidate them next to each other. But that’s a far cry from the hours I used to spent shuffling bottles every other day.
I just look at my recently consumed bottles as it lists the prior locations. You don’t know exactly how far to go back, but I have boxes on the floor waiting on bins to open up. When I start seeing bins opening I’ll get on CT and look back 6 bottles, 12 bottles, etc. Then I go check and see if say my 12th bin is open and I know I can put away a case or couple of 6 packs. Not exact unless you want to hunt down that very last open bin but it works fairly well for me.
Yes, I intentionally do not organize things in any way whatsoever, so I never have to defragment. Random stow: as I unpack stuff, it just goes into any empty slot, and I record it in CT. I guess if I had a massive cellar with a lot of free space I could try to categorize, but that’s not the reality and I’m not sure it would be worth it for my style anyway.
This is exactly what I do. You don’t even have to print (though that makes it easier). If you have two bottles per location (as I do in much but not all of my cellar), then if I only see one wine I know there is an empty slot. And if I look and see that the list goes from K to M, then I know that slot L is open (which may be one or two slots depending on where in the cellar). I also just do the visual thing also. When I have new wine I look to see where there is an empty slot. As I am near (well really over) capacity (cough cough), my physical organization that started out nicely by region and varietal is starting to fall apart. But that is where CT comes to the rescue! I try to keep like with like, but I do not want to spend the time moving and re cataloguing where things are, so I tolerate some dissonance on where certain wines are physically located. Without CT that would be a nightmare. With it, it works perfectly fine.
To each his own. I would hate having everything spread out randomly throughout the cellar and not being able to stand in front of the champagne section and browse. Walking through my cellar is a journey - I’d lose that, as well as all aesthetics. It’s satisfying to see all the same capsules together for a producer. And I love having everything in order by producer/wine/vintage so I can just reach down a few rows if I suddenly have the desire to know how many 14s I have left while looking at 12s. When we moved everything onsite, Jonathan refused to even consider the random bin assignment approach, and I didn’t take much convincing.
FWIW, I didn’t mean the ONLY free slots are at the end of the section, just that there are always some free ones there. Slots open up all the time throughout. We surprisingly don’t have to move things around all that often, and usually just within a producer, maybe because most of what comes in new is in cases, and goes first into case storage for a few years. By the time it’s ready to come out, good space has opened up within that region/producer. For instance, we recently brought out a case of the 2010 Vallana Campi Raudii just as we were down to our last bottle of 2006, so the spaces that used to hold 2006 now hold the 2010s and all that had to happen was moving up the 07s and 08s.
Same here. I do my browsing and selecting on CT and only go to the cellar to grab them.
Like others, I run the “storage location” report. It shows the number of bottles currently in each bin. If the number is less than what I know the capacity is, I know there are slots available for new wine in that bin.