A stainless steel wine rack from Amazon that fits perfectly in a basement or closet.
Our personal wine cellar can use a bit of organizing. If you are like us, you purchase wines and when you get home, you put them away with the rest of your wine stash. When it’s time to grab a bottle of wine, you grab what’s easily accessible or sometimes you think about a wine that you have and search for it. Often with us, we are pleasantly surprised at what we find, sometimes forgetting about our purchases. We have the best intentions of getting the wines organized and then life happens. Since we have some time at home, we’d like to dig into our wines, reminisce about the wonderful experiences we had at these wineries and get these wines organized. Here are a few tips we’ll use and want to share them with you.
Find a wine rack or shelving system that you can store in a cool place. This doesn’t have to be expensive. Get one that fits your space and your wine buying habit. For us, one rack works great and we found it on Amazon. We currently store around 100 bottles of wine on this rack that’ll hold 168.
Assign sections by wine type (red, white, rosé, sparkling, dessert).
Use wine bottle tags so you don’t have to dig through your wine cellar.
Organize by vintage then varietal. We used these wine tags from Amazon to write the vintage, varietal and producer. We also use dot stickers to indicate the wines that are “anytime wines” meaning we can drink and easily replace these. These might also be wines we pull for Tuesday night pizza or when we finished gardening. Other wines might be saved for a nice dinner we make, gifts for family and friends or special occasions.
CellarTracker App on iOS
Use a system to track your wines like Cellartracker or an Excel spreadsheet. Cellartracker is free to use and ties you into a great social network to review wines and recommends when wines are peaking. This will be helpful so you can see which wines need to be consumed. Select a tracking system that works best for you. I like to track not only details about the wine but also the price I paid for it. If we grow our wine collection, we’ll adopt a system similar to what Fat Olives has where we number the shelves and track the wine by shelves on a spreadsheet. That way, we can sort by producer, vintage and varietal.
Remember, a lot of wines are short term storage wines and you may not hold them for long. Choosing a system that best works for your space and you is key.