Keeping your wines organized is manageable with a small wine stock, but how do you do it when your wine collection consists of several hundred bottles? Here are a few tips.
Storing wine in a wine cabinet
In most wine cabinets, wine bottles are arranged in a double row: front row and back row; the necks in the middle. We briefly break down the two most common ways of storing them in a wine cabinet: per layer on a (sliding) shelf or stacking them on a storage shelf.
1. (Sliding) shelf
If you place your wine on a shelf that can hold a single row of bottles, it is helpful if this shelf can slide out. That way you can see at a glance what is in the front and back of the cabinet. If the shelf cannot slide out, make sure that the bottle at the front of the cabinet corresponds as closely as possible to the bottle at the back of the cabinet. This way you can still put 6 varieties on one shelf.
2. Storage shelf
On a storage shelf you can stack large amounts of wine, sometimes up to 60 bottles. The only way to keep it organized is if you either stack all wines of the same kind on a shelf or make sure you do it like this: suppose you have 3 boxes of 12 bottles. Then make sure you:
- kind 1 stack left, front and back,
- sort 2 in the middle and
- kind 3 right.
This way you can also pick up a bottle from different wines without having to move everything.
Identification labels
On all shelves of the EuroCave wine cabinets you can place cards (included) on which you can write which wine is stored. The more luxurious sliding and storage shelves even have black steel labels on which you can write with a white marker.
Storing wine in a wine rack
This is where giving advice becomes more difficult, because there are many wine racks on the market, all with their own way of storing. Therefore, we limit ourselves to global guidelines and advice.
Wine slates, neck labels, etc.
There are many tools on the market for identifying your wines. Consider:
- Wine slates (made of cardboard with blackboard paint or real slate)
- labels that can be hung around the neck of the bottle
- A part of the box in which the wine was stored where you can read the name (or the front of a wooden crate), which you simply place between the bottles.
With your soul
If you have the option of placing the bottles soul-facing, the advantage is that you can read the label without having to take the wine bottle from the rack (perhaps this is the time to dispel the myth that bottles should be turned every x time...don't! Wine should mature in peace, so don't touch it (just to start drinking). So what should be rotated? Those are the champagne bottles that are in the pupitre and need to be rotated to eventually remove the yeast clot that forms during secondary fermentation).
Compartments per variety
It may make sense to put wines by variety in a compartment, but if the compartments are larger than the number of bottles of a variety, be sure to separate them by putting variety x on the left and variety y on the right. Also, species z? That will be in the middle. As long as the front bottles are equal to the back ones, searching is kept to a minimum (in the case of double layering the wines). It's best if the compartment size can change with the number of bottles, like the lava stone wine rack Gardevin. But in most cases, you will still need to move your wines from time to time if the stock of a variety has diminished.
In general terms
It doesn't really matter how you organize your wine cellar, as long as it is orderly for you, and that is usually by following a system. Here are a few
- White wines at the bottom of the compartment, then rosé and light red wines, and at the top, burgundy and bordeaux wines.
- Store wines at the bottom and at the very top of the shelves and drinking wines at eye and pack level.
- Group countries together
- Sort into price categories
Of course, if you have any handy tips of your own, please let us know.
Don't forget to take a look at our wine rack overview page.
