How do people track their wine inventory in a Eurocave?

WINE TALK
21

I have a single VintageKeeper (called A in CT), a double wide VintageKeeper (B and C), case storage in my cold cellar (D), and case storage at an offsite location.

I have CellarTracker set up with two locations (Cellar and Offsite). My Cellar wines are tracked by VK unit (A-C) and row. Or cold storage (D) and box/case. For example: C12 or D22.

Each VK row only holds 14 bottles (7 across and 2 deep) so it only takes a few seconds to find 1 bottle out of 14.

22

Much like Andrew, I’ve narrowed it down to sides (left/ right) and shelves A to N, along with cases on the bottom.
Same for passive where I have narrowed it down to rack & shelf. Don’t need exact location as long as it’s a 1 in 12 shot of finding it.

23

I’m looking forward to pulling a bunch of partial cases from my open storage. I’ve also started redirecting pending deliveries to my home.

It will be full in no time even without the order I’m placing today to fill out a case.

24

I use GPS.

25

Like some others mentioned, I organise by row as separate bins in CT. One I did to help is print out labels for each row to make it a bit quicker to locate the row I’m looking for.

26

More shelves, then label like a spreadsheet as others have mentioned.

If that’s not an option and you must stack several high per shelf, neck hangers will make it easier to identify bottles after your inventory tells you which shelf to search.

27

Well, you were certainly right about that.

28

By region. Sort of. I couldn’t imagine actually trying to track individual bottles. I don’t choose wine like that.

29

I do this with an attempt to group the rows by region. Strong emphasis on attempt - when I first got my eurocaves I had lots of spare spots for bottles and had a really elaborate system of organizing by region, but somehow after having them for a couple years, I’m now in the position of just trying to find the one shelf that actually has an empty slot. Amazing how these things fill themselves up…

30

By column. There’s some general themes, so what’s where makes sense, what could be behind what makes sense. I can find bottles quickly enough, and can move things around without having to adjust CT listings.

31

I organize by shelf - Tuesday night wine at the top and then a mix of better in drinking window bottles and aging as you go down.

Overall though, once it comes into the home, I mark as consumed in ct.

32

Every time I think I have a handle on this as I am a meticulous CT user, my wife will pull a bottle for friends and not note that she pulled it or pull one then put it back in a different place. Argh. If someone has a tracker for that, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. [snort.gif]

33

Um, how? Are your wines in traveling mode?

34

I use Cellartracker.

I have numbered columns from left to right, and lettered rows from top to bottle. All the single digit row numbers have a 0 before them. I don’t see any point in tracking whether the bottle is first or second in the bin, that’s a bunch of effort with no value to it.

So if a wine is in 04F, that means it’s in the fourth column from left, and 6th row from the top.

The reason for the 0 is so when you print out reports, columns 10 and higher don’t appear in front of the single digit ones. But you could decide whether you care about that.

I input bottles into CT and (try my best to) log them out when they come out. Inevitably, over time, there are mistakes and they start to add up, so the best practice would be once in awhile (every few years?) to do an inventory. If you don’t want to do a true bottle-by-bottle inventory, then at least print out a report, look for bins with too many or too few bottles showing (e.g. your bins are two deep and your CT shows three or four bottles in the bin) and go audit those and correct the mistakes.

It’s definitely something that takes work, but it’s better than losing wines and/or having to spend 20 minutes to find a bottle all the time. And CT has so many advantages – you see recent notes often containing useful information (maturity, decanting, market value), you can look up your inventory at your computer or on your phone, you have an inventory for insurance purposes, etc.

Of course, the smaller the storage unit and collection, the less need there is for this kind of detailed tracking. A smaller group of wines you might just record what you have and not the location, or maybe not bother at all. But as the collection gets large, trying to intuit what you have and where it is becomes impossible, especially given the long lag between when you buy things and years or decades later when you want to drink them.

1 Like
35

Joke. [wow.gif]