Wine Cellar Organization

As many of you know, we recently put a wine room in our house. Wine has become such a big part of our lives, so we are passionate about having a dedicated space in our home for this growing hobby. We are currently putting the finishing touches on the wine room, so I’ll have a full blog post on that soon. In the meantime, I decided it would be fun to share a little bit about our wine cellar organization process. Keep on reading if you are curious about our new wine cellar and how we keep track of several hundred bottles of wine!

Overview

We purchased the Wine Enthusiast VinoView 310-Bottle Wine Cellar. We have about 200 bottles, so we figured this would be a good option for us. This wine fridge is comprised of two separate units, and each unit has 12 different rows/drawers that pull out. Each row can fit 12 standard (750ml) bottles of wine. There is also some extra room at the bottom to fit larger format bottles like magnums.

We keep each fridge set at 54 degrees, as that is a proper cellaring temperature for most (if not all) of these wines. We plan to keep some of these bottles for 10+ years, so it is extremely important to store them at the correct temperature.

How It’s Organized

Before we purchased these new wine fridges, we had all of our wine tracked in CellarTracker. We’ve been using this tool for a couple years now and it’s a great way to keep track of which bottles you have in stock. I would highly recommend tracking your wine in CellarTracker if you have 50+ bottles. It’s a free tool to use, and it has been extremely helpful in keeping track of which bottles we have and haven’t consumed. Depending on how much wine you have and your needs, you can pay a small fee for some of their premium features. For now, we just use the free version and that has been more than enough for us.

When moving our wine to the new cellar, we kept everything in CellarTracker, but added more detail as to where it was located. We previously did not keep track of location, but when you have 200 bottles of wine, it’s nice to know where everything is!

Since we have two distinct fridges, each wine is given a location of either the Left Fridge or Right Fridge. To take it a step further, I also labeled which drawer/row the wine is located in. For example, the wine could have a location of Left Fridge Row 6 or Right Fridge Row 12. I think this is a pretty easy and efficient way to keep track of where everything is. Also, CellarTracker makes is so easy to add this information into the system! You can customize what you name your different cellar locations, so it is very user friendly and versatile.

So which bottles actually go where? This was probably the toughest part to figure out before cellaring all of the wine. About half of our collection consists of Cabernet Sauvignon and Bourdeaux Blends, so we decided to dedicate an entire fridge to just those two varietals. Everything else would go in the other fridge and would be sorted by varietal. If you care to have a little more detail, I’ll break it down for you below.

Left Fridge

Like I said above, we dedicated an entire fridge to house all of our Cabernet and Bordeaux Blends. Our left wine cellar contains all of these bottles, and it is organized like so:

• Rows 1-3: “Top Shelf” Wines
  • These are wines that we spent the most money on and will age for the longest amount of time. Basically, we might open one or two of these bottles per year.
• Rows 4-11: All California Cabernet Sauvignon
• Row 12: Bordeaux Blends

Right Fridge

The other cellar contains a mixture of everything else we own (except the sparkling wine). We have it organized by varietal so it would be very easy to locate a bottle of wine.

• Row 1: Napa Pinot Noir
• Row 2: Oregon Pinot Noir
• Row 3: Sonoma Pinot Noir
• Row 4-5: Zinfandel
• Row 6: Cabernet Franc
• Row 7: Petite Sirah and Syrah
• Row 8: Merlot
• Row 9: Random California Red Wines
• Row 10: International Red Wines
• Row 11: Rosé
• Row 12: All white wines (any varietal)

We decided to keep all of our sparkling wines and champagne in the “wine drawer” of our everyday food refrigerator. Those bottles tend to be awkward in size, so it is better to keep them separate from the actual wine cellar. Also, I prefer sparkling wine to be served at a colder temperature, so we keep that drawer at 42 degrees.

We do still have a couple of wine racks that are located in our open living space at room temperature. We use these for some of our “everyday” bottles. These are wines that we plan to consume within a couple months, so there really isn’t a need to cellar them. Also, these are typically wines that we don’t spend as much money on. Most of these bottles are about $20 and under. It’s always nice to have wines like this available and ready to go! We can’t afford to drink our fancy wine every night 🙂

As always, let me know if you have any questions about our wine cellar or the organization process. It took us about half a day to get all of our wine organized, so it’s definitely something you could tackle over the weekend. I promise, it’s not as overwhelming as one would think. Cheers my friends!