How do you Organize your Storage

Just added 4 x 150 bottle eurocaves and I’m reorganizing things in my cellar. I have a wide mix of wines with various drinking windows. Do I store by grape, drinking window, other???

What are your preferences or mistakes/lessons learned?

I used to organize by region, then producer, then vintage. But at some point organization will get messed up cuz all the wine coming in. I’ve given up. Now I just organize by region and hopefully find an empty space for producer to stay together without moving too many bottles around. Pretty soon, I’ll give up on producer also.

My storage (~130 bottles) is chaos. I try not to disturb the bottles once they’ve been placed, but maybe that’s not really that big a problem.

I use Vinoteka to reproduce the racks and boxes in my cellar and don’t worry about where I stick the wine. As long as I am diligent about logging it in I can find it easily. You could do basically the same thing with Cellar Tracker or even a spreadsheet.

Joe is right, that whatever you start out with in terms of regions and all, it will eventually get mixed up as things come in and go out, unless you have lots of surplus storage all the time.

The best thing to do is use CellarTracker. Then it won’t matter what is where, so long as you have it inventoried in CT, you can just look it up on your phone, your computer, or on a printout that you do periodically.

Give each unit a name or number, then number the racks 01 through 10 (or whatever) left to right across the top, and A through L (or whatever) top to bottom. A bottle goes into Unit 1, bin 06D, and there it is.

Lol, man Chris that’s too much work. I just look for a bottle where I think it should be and then curse when I can’t find it. Then I wonder if I drank it and never removed it from CT. Then I find it months later where it shoulda been.

I would very much like to have your wine problems gentlemen.

i used to label them individually in the racking in CT. So row 7 column 1 etc. (7.1). Then I got lazy and now it’s a mishmash. Regret doing that. Now I can’t find stuff

I have no inventory control, but keep things roughly organized. I have several storage lockers, each devoted to one or two wine regions: one for bordeaux and cabs (subdivided by key vintages), one for Northern Rhones and Chinons and then one for CDP, Bojo and Zins. My wine fridge at work is transitional space to take in delivery then move elsewhere. My home fridge is all wines with the goal of it mostly being daily drinkers or wines that are in the front que for drinking, like more mature wines.

It seems to work, and fun enough, sometimes I find a gem I no longer knew I had.

My process is to cram wine willy-nilly into any open crevice in the cellar that I can find.

I just do it alphabetically according to height.

I use CT, but i keep track of boxes as opposed to individual bins. i used to spread bottles out around boxes as if i was looking for a particular bottle, i could find it in any of four boxes (assuming i still had 4). while that system worked for a while, as my cellar has expanded, i find it easier to keep all wines of a particular region in 1 place; and all multiples of a wine together.

I sort of have an area for domestics and then an area for foreigners. In the domestics, I basically have pinots and zins separated out, but the rest is total chaos. In the foreign section (against another wall in my basement) I try to keep all the Italians together, the French together, etc.

The biggest issue is planning far enough ahead that when I get a new shipment of Turley, I have enough empty spots around current Turley stocks to keep it together. So far, only failure.

Pretty random but all tracked by row/column bin# in CT. Wines that are aging are on the West wall, (more or less) ready to drink are on the East wall. I try to keep the 2-4 bottles of each wine together and sometimes even succeed.

With the exception of Pine Ridge which has it’s own section, and within that by appellation (Stag’s Leap, Oakville, Howell Mt., Rutherford) & variety.

FIFY.

Bruce

I do what Chris says - location and bin is tagged in CT, then the cellar is organized (virtually) in any way I want by selecting the sort field.

The only exception is, daily drinkers/short term storage is on the floor of the cellar (or in the fridge for whites) and the wife knows any bottles in these locations is fair game. These areas I’m worst at keeping track of.

My “bins” are row/column like Fu described, and when I take in large amounts of wine, about 3-4 times per year I get up-to-date by doing a quite simple inventory check, by comparing empty bins in the cellar to those marked empty in CT.

There was an intended physical organization, but over time that necessarily becomes fragmented. I’ve been considering going through and doing a de-frag but it’s time consuming and really no upside.

I organize by region and within region from oldest to youngest. Well, except for most of my 05 burgundies, which are either on top of my burgundy rack or in boxes in the middle of the floor. Oh, and except for half bottles which are in the few X bins I have. And a bunch of 01 Germans (and some older/younger auslesen), which are on top of the German rack.

There’s a bit more chaos but you get the drift. Yet, I rarely have trouble finding anything unless I’ve neglected to remove it from CT inventory. Well, except for a bottle of 1985 Roumier Ruchottes that disappeared.

+1. I still have a fair amount of extra space, and even then I found I have to move bottles around constantly to adhere to a rigorous organization. So all I can do is region, and producer as best as possible.

I don’t have unique locations, just bins of 30-60 bottles each. I figure that will get me close enough.

I use Cellar Tracker too with the A1 to A20 etc so I can put any bottle in any slot and still find it. That way I can find any bottle in the cellar in no time. The new Cellar Tracker makes it easy record the location of incoming wines. To me it’s important to be able to find any bottle I want easily and monitor the development of my wines to make sure I drink them at the right time and avoid having them go over the hill. It does take some time enter all the wines in CT but for me it’s worth it.

+1

+2