You’ve finally taken the exciting step of investing in your ideal wine storage scenario for your home or business. You may have even found a favourite local wine merchant to help you stock your cellar with amazing vintages. But there’s just one final detail that may have been missed: an organisational system.
Having this simple setup in place can help you:
- Save Time – If your cellar is disorganized, you’ll spend way too many moments searching for that perfect bottle.
- Save Money – By seeing more clearly what you already have, you’ll be much less likely to purchase redundant labels.
- Reduce Clutter – If you’re an enthusiastic collector or have joined a wine club (or three), your inventory could begin to stack up and create a bit of chaos.
Now let’s take a look at a few tips and tools to simplify your life as a collector.
Start With Shelving – Installing quality racks and shelves can help you to make the most of every square foot of your cellar or other storage space. Team EWC can create an aesthetically pleasing system of shelving that makes sense for your available area.
Select Your Sorting Method – There are many different ways to catalogue your bottles, but here are some suggestions to help get you started:
- By Colour – This is one of the simplest ways to sort, but it can also be the most effective, especially if you’re just starting your wine collection.
- By Grape – If you’ve decided to arrange your wine by colour, the next layer of organisation is to categorise your wine by grape type, such as Merlot, Syrah and Sauvignon. If you have loads of reds, you may wish to further organise them by varietal, such as Malbec, Grenache or Pinot Noir.
- By Region – Is your collection more global in nature? Even if your selection of bottles tends to be national, you’ll often find that your array of wine represents several different regions in a particular country. In the U.S., some of the top wine regions include California, New York, Texas, Virginia and Arizona.
- By Expiry Date – Contrary to popular belief, not all wines should be cellared. In fact, most are meant to be enjoyed within two to three years after purchase. For your wines that require aging, consider organising your bottles by “best drink by” date.
Tag Your Bottles – When storing wine long-term (longer than a week), bottles should be stored on their sides to help ensure that the corks don’t dry out. However, this does make it more difficult to read the labels. The solution? Add tags to your bottles. Slip them onto the corks and you’ll be able to identify every bottle in your cellar at a glance. You can simply list the name of the wine on the tag, or include other information such as the vintage, price or when and where you purchased it.
Create a Digital Inventory – Even with proper labelling in place, you’ll want to have all of your bottles entered into a spreadsheet or – better yet – one of the multiple wine inventory apps available. These apps allow you to manage your collection via remote, scan labels into your database or make notes.
Ready to chat about keeping your collection streamlined as it continues to grow? Just give us a call or shoot us a text or email at your leisure. We’re happy to assist!