Organized Wine « My Wine Education

Organized Wine

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I fully admit that things aren’t going to be back to normal around here for another week. But for the next couple days, I’m going to try to get one little post in per day, plus the Friday event listing. After that, the relatives will go home, the services will be over, and we can find our new normal. So, on with the first of these little posts:

I’m leading a book club session at an upcoming conference on the book "Everything is Miscellaneous." It got me thinking about how I organize – or more appropriately, would like to organize – my wine. We don’t have a wine cellar, instead, wine is in three small temperature controlled coolers and then shoved into every available spot in our house. I do, however, tag our wine. Each bottle has a hanging tag that lists the type of wine on the front. On the back it lists the drink by date, where it was purchased, and how much we paid. In addition to the haphazard physical organization of my wine, I have most of my bottles logged into CellarTracker. Like most of these online wine organization tools, it lets me view my bottles by vintage, purchase location, varietal, and so on. CellarTracker does not yet use tagging, although I read somewhere that tagging is a coming upgrade. (Don’t quote me on that though.)

I started wondering how everyone else organizes their wine and it led me to Donna M’s blog. Donna is an information architect and compulsive organizer. However, if I had the space, I would organize my wines exactly as Donna has – by varietal, then vintage, and then with all the other information on my hanging tags. I don’t see this as a complicated organization scheme. Where it runs into difficulty is the same place that most physical organization schemes run into difficulty – when you add a new bottle. There may not be room for that bottle between 1996 and 1998 Cabernets. Then what? Years and years ago I worked at a video store. When new releases came in, we had to move every single movie just to fit in the new one. It is the bane of the alphabetical and physical world. The advantage CellarTracker has over physicality is that it also allows me to note where I stored the wine and sort by storage location as well.

Just some thoughts as my professional world and wine world overlap yet again.

Cross-posted to the Write Tech blog.