I love keeping my wine cellar organised. As our wine collection has grown, I’ve been developing a bit of a system for keeping our wines organised so that we know what we have, what we can drink, and what to keep. Organising my wine always sparks joy and I decided to share what I know so you can do it too. So here is my handy guide on how to organise your wine cellar.
Whether you are just starting out or have bottles coming out of your ears, it is such a good exercise to go through and organise your collection. Over the year’s we have bought so many bottles of wine here and there, and because I am a hoarder we haven’t drunk them. When they are all sitting there in a cellar, it’s hard to know:
- Where they came from
- How much they are worth
- When you should drink them
When I was going for a bottle of wine, I felt overwhelmed with choice. Which wine should I open? Should I open it now? Is it pizza or special occasion wine? I longed for a system where I could know what I needed to know at a glance. Yes, it could be a next-level wine crazy person manoeuvre (my partner certainly thought so), but it will make your life so much easier.
I didn’t realise exactly what I was embarking on before I started, but I learnt some handy hints which made it so much easier. So, I thought it would be good to share them in this how to organise your wine cellar guide.
This article is about setting up your wine cellar physically. If you’d like to track the wines in your cellar, use this handy cellar tracker.
Step one: get some supplies
You don’t need much to organise your wine cellar, and it isn’t really that expensive to do. First things first, however, you’ll need a space to set up your wine cellar if you haven’t already. Either a wine fridge or a wine rack where you can safely store your bottles. I’m not going to make this about the right cellaring temperatures etc as we aren’t here to worry about the exact temperature of blah blah, we are here to Marie Kondo this stuff! For us, we are luckily enough to have a whole room dedicated to wine. We’ve got a wine fridge and a large wine rack (which is almost full I might add). For you, depending on the size of your collection, you might have a single wine rack with a few rows of wine. Just make sure nothing is in boxes because you’ll forget about it!
Once you’ve got the space for your wines, you’ll need to get the following:
- Wine storage (I have started using these modular wine racks from Amazon)
- A sharpie or other permanent marker (nothing too thick)
- Tags for your wine bottles (I love these from Amazon)
- A device with internet (preferably a smartphone)
- Some good tunes or a good movie to stop you from going crazy halfway through
- The willpower to abstain from drinking all the delicious wine you forgot you had on hand
- A couple of free hours on your weekend, depending on the size of your collection
So once you’ve got all of that, you’re ready to go!
A note on wine tags
There are a few options when it comes to wine tags for your wine bottles. You want to be able to see them easily when the wines are in the wine rack, so you can scan your bottles quickly.
You can use any tag for your wine bottles. I started with simple kraft tags with string because they have a lot of room on them. But recently I’ve upgraded to actual wine tags and they sit so much better on the bottles. You can pick these up from Amazon here.
It is completely up to you what you use. Kraft tags are easy to get and a bit cheaper than the ones made specifically for bottles of wine. Just be mindful of the size when you order them (I recently ordered 200 which were way too big). If you’re happy to spend a little extra time I think the brown tags look cute, but if you don’t mind spending a bit more and want something easier, go for the wine tags.
What to write on your tags
So now that you have your supplies you need to decide what to put on the tags. This will differ from person to person depending on what you want to know, and some of the tags even have this already!
For me, I really wanted to know a few key things:
- Year
- Variety
- Region
- Price
- When to drink it
- Where I got it
Start by thinking about what you want to know quickly when you’re scanning your cellar. Things like the date, variety and region are something you’d normally have to pull the bottle out for. So having it on a visible label makes it much easier to find the wine you’re after!
Things like having the price and when to drink it help you decide which bottle to choose. Are you in the mood for something fancy or a pizza wine? And should you be opening that bottle or leaving it for a few more years? These are things that aren’t on the label but can be really important if you are ageing your wine, or want to hoard your good bottles!
The last part – ‘where I got it’ is something I put on the back of the tag. This may not be something relevant to you if you buy your wine in bulk but for us, our wine cellar contains a rich history. Over the years we’ve built it up through trips to different regions and wine shows, and each bottle has a story. I wanted to capture this so that we didn’t forget, and we had a nice reminder of the time we bought it each time we opened a bottle. Call me sentimental, but that’s just how I roll! But it’s really up to you if you put this in or not.
How to find the information for your tags
So now that you’re ready to write on your tags, you need to know where to get that information. I mean, some of them are easy to find, but others take a bit of digging. Luckily I’ve been through it and found a couple of easy tools to use!
Information like the year, variety and vintage are easy as they are on the label. If you are putting where you got them this should be easy unless you’ve forgotten (I did have this issue with a couple of wines until I found out they were gifts my partner had been given). The price is even something you might remember if you didn’t buy it that long ago, and moving forward something you will easily be able to recall. But if you don’t remember the price, where do you find it? And how on Earth do you know when to drink your wine? Sometimes it will be on the label but more often than not you need to do a bit of digging for this crucial information.
The first place to look is on the back of the label, as they might have been good enough to indicate how long to cellar it for. I was surprised that many didn’t have this as I thought it was something important, but I guess it isn’t an exact science!
To get the price and drinking years, the next thing you can do is plug it into Google. I put the whole name in, and I found there were a couple of websites that were particularly useful. I told you how to organise your wine cellar guide would have it all!
Useful websites
- The WINEFRONT – This is a paid website, but they still provide the key information you need on a lot of wines. I found more well-known wines and regions were on here, but for anything from a smaller wine region, I had to keep digging. The best part about this website is you type in the name of the wine and, if it’s on there, it comes up with the price and drinking years without you having to pay a cent! It was definitely the wine information jackpot.
- Wine-Searcher – I found this website to have a lot more of the wines I was looking for, but it was a bit sketchy on the information. You can usually get a price from here, and under the ‘tasting notes’ tab, you can also sometimes find the drinking date. This is only if there have been reviews of the wine that have included this, so again it is usually only for more well-known wines.
- CellarTracker – CellarTracker also had a good selection, and would often include the drinking year right at the top of a listing which was very helpful. However, this comes from other wine lovers, so it may not be included, and also may not be all that accurate. But after this whole process, I’m beginning to question what accuracy is in this anyway, so if you find a year you may as well grab it!
- Vivino – for those of you using a smartphone for the exercise, you can normally find the price of the wine using Vivino. Plus it gets point for being easy to use as you can just take a photo of the wine to search for it.
What to do if you can’t find information
If none of these avenues worked, I’d try the winery website as sometimes it would have it there. Or just a basic Google search to see what came up. But if you really can’t find it, take an estimated guess based on the tasting notes and variety. Also if you can find the drinking year for a previous vintage, you can use this as a guide. For the ones I did this with, I put a spot next to it to let future me know that it was just a guess. I found I had to do this with a lot of wines from the Granite Belt.
I know I may have offended some people here, but honestly taking an educated guess is what you have to do sometimes!
Getting through the wines
Now that this how to organise your wine cellar guide has given you the process, it is just a matter of time. Put on a good movie and get going. I started by taking everything out Marie Kondo style and creating a pile as I went. You might have a better method, but I felt having everything out was the best way to go as it gave me a bit of a progress report and ensured I didn’t miss anything.
In terms of which wines to label, that’s entirely up to you. I stuck to those wines that could be aged or were a bit special. This means all the reds that weren’t everyday wines, Chardonnay and other white wines for ageing (didn’t have many of these), and some extra white and rose that was a bit special. I avoided labelling all our whites because they need to be drunk, and the same with our sparklings and champagnes. If you want to do the full cellar, you definitely can. I just felt it was a waste of time!
Although this takes a while, it’s actually a really fun process. You stumble upon bottles you completely forgot about, and rediscover hidden gems. I was amazed by how much we’ve spent on wine, but also excited that some of those bottles are almost ready for drinking. It brought up plenty of laughs too remembering where we bought the wines.
Sorting and organising your wine room
Once you’ve finally gotten through all your wines, it’s time to put them back in your cellar. We took this opportunity to reorganise the order of our wines. Previously we’ve stored them based on year, but because now we had handy drinking year notes, we were able to store them by when we should drink them. I’d highly recommend this if you are wanting to easily find those wines that are ok to drink in your cellar, as they’ll be top of mind. But it is your choice – you might also want to sort by region, variety or something completely different!
To sort by drinking year I got some help putting the wines into clusters from my partner. Then it was just a matter of putting them back in the cellar. With the wine tags, I put them on the top of the bottle and twisted them so the information faces out, but this touch really depends on how OCD you are.
And there you have it! You’ve sorted your cellar using the tips from this how to organise your wine cellar guide.
In summary: how to organise your wine cellar guide
I’m not going to say sorting my cellar was easy. It was definitely something that took a lot of effort and time. But I am so glad I’ve done it. Now we can easily identify the wines in our cellar, and which ones we should drink. We don’t need to worry about forgetting where we got a bottle of wine either. I felt so accomplished and organised when I finished, and also like I wanted to drink a lot of wine!
This exercise is heartwarming because you find all these special bottles in your collection that you can reminisce over. It was so fun rediscovering our wine collection. Now we have a system in place I feel we know what we have and can easily keep adding to the collection. And drink what we have without wondering if we should have!
Have you tried something like this? I’d love to hear in the comments below if you have any other tips to add to this how to organise your wine cellar guide!
