Would you like a lot of cheese with that wine?

So amidst visits and illnesses, one of the things I’ve been working on is cataloging our wine cellar.  I’ve never actually tried it before, which sounds weird for an inveterate organizer like me, but there it is.  

I previously had a system of putting a little dangler in each bottle neck indicating if a wine was an A (faboo), B (quite nice), or C (generically drinkable), and the year that it should be drunk by. Sometimes I’d record the price I’d bought the wine for, and when.  Then periodically I’d shift the bottles around so that the stuff nearest (or past) drink-by was at the top of the racks.

That really didn’t tell me much about what wine I had, and coming up with drink-by dates was often catch as catch can (some wineries are big into them, others shun them).  As a result, I often had boxes of unclassified wine, and even if I didn’t, if I decided that what a special dinner required was a nice Cab, I still had to look at all the soon-to-expire bottles.

In doing some poking around after some drink-by dates, I ran across an online wine cellar system.  Not the first time I had, but the first time it had piqued my interest.  I gave it (ManageYourCellar) a whirl with some bottles I had upstairs.

Nice.  Easy reports, easy data entry, and a nice way to keep track of what I had.  I knew, though, that there were other systems out there similar to ManageYourCellar.  So I did a bit of digging, and found some recommendations for CellarTracker.  While the interface wasn’t quite as slick, it seems to have a larger community (which means more bottles of wine already listed, pricing/values from same, ratings, and drink-by dates).  And it has nice reports, too, and it’s easy to put stuff into it.

And so I did.  Put our wine cellar into it.  Nearly all of it.

Came to some conclusions, too.

1. We have a lot of wine.  Tiny collection compared to some, perhaps,   But 142 bottles cataloged, totaling (an appalling amount of money) dollars. 
2. And that doesn’t count the port/desserts, which I haven’t entered yet because I have the rack double/treble-stacked.
3. And that doesn’t count a couple of boxes of wine that I couldn’t catalog either because, again, I’m out of rack space.
4. And it doesn’t count the “C” wines.  Those come in/out too fast to really track easily.
5. On the other side, I have plenty of opportunity to reduce my collection, because I have quite a number of bottles that are past their mature date.  Eek!

And the ultimate conclusion:  I need more help drinking wine.  Hopefully there are some doughty volunteers in my immediate social circle willing to lend a hand.