11 Jul How to Organize Your Wine Cellar

Here are several ideas to catalog and categorize your wine collection.

In recent times, wine collection has grown to be a hobby that many people are interested in getting into on a daily basis. It all begins with a lot of fun and excitement. However, as your inventory of wine grows, there is a need for a standard method of organizing your collection of wines. Otherwise, all will amount to chaos and headaches. 

If you are starting with your wine collection, there is a great need for anticipating the growth of your collection of wines. Often times, people who would like to collect wines usually begins with 1-5 bottles and find themselves increasing it more and more. 

Whether you have a small or a relatively large collection of wines, there is a great need for a method of organizing your residential wine cellar. However, your own system of organizing your wine could either bring about efficiency or confusion. If you are unsure of the methods of organizing your wine cellars, here are a few effective tips for organizing your wines:

Organize Wines by Region

This is the most commonly accepted method of assembling a collection of wine. Usually, wines come from a wide array of regions, including the United States of America and other areas. Each of these regions is blessed with unique characteristics that significantly influences the flavor as well as the quality of the wines that are being produced. 

Whenever you purchase a bottle of wine from a wine store, ensure that you check the region in which the wine was produced or manufactured. You could also look out for where the grapes used in the production of the wines were grown. 

Obviously, there are lots of wine collectors that organizes their wines based on the country while you could find others organizing their wines by state and followed by region. There are a countless number of ways to do that, but the most effective method is the use of bottles tags. 

Wine tags are quite helpful specifically if you are in a hurry while searching for a specific wine bottle. More so, this method of wine organization makes it possible to organize wine collections into reds, desserts as well as fortified sections. 

Apart from wine tags, some also make use of Excel in creating a spreadsheet that consists of essential information pertaining to each of the wine bottles. Some of the information that is usually requested in the spreadsheet includes brands, appellation, scores, prices, location, vintage, and so forth. 

Organize Wines by Color and Type

If this your first time of wine collection, there is no doubt that you’ll want to organize your wines through simples methods. And yes, one of the easiest and most comfortable ways of organizing wines is by color. You could simply separate the reds from the wines. You can separate further with sparkling wines. Generally, new wine collectors usually have smaller wines, and there isn’t any need to use an advanced classification system in organizing your wine. 

Organize Wines by Varietal

Among the collectors of wine, storing both red and white wines in separates areas of your home wine cellars or refrigerators is a common phenomenon. However, some wine enthusiast takes a step further by grouping each variety of grape in a similar area. For instance, all types of Pinot Noir would be stored in the same area while the Cabs variety in another separate area. With this, if the demands are high for Chardonnay, they’ll know the exact place to find them.

Organize Wines by Brand

If you are a wine collector and you prefer to collect wines in bulk or multiple quantities, there is a whole lot of benefit from keeping wines that are of similar brands together. Interestingly, some wine collectors develop verticals of their various brands of wines. This implies that they have bottles of related wines, from similar vintages. While collecting your wines, you may choose to have different shelves to represent different regions. For each of these regions, you can go further by breaking them down into varietals and also by shelves as well. 

Organize Wines by Price 

Wines come with varying degrees of qualities. Most varieties of wines usually contain different levels when it comes to quality. While some wines can be collected for daily consumption, others might be meant for an extended period. Generally, wines that are consumed daily are usually less costly, while the ones that are allowed to age are usually expensive. Price of wines is one of the criteria or modalities when it comes to organizing your wine collection.