Wine Inventory

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I should have taken a photo. The two of us, sitting on our basement floor, each with a glass of cabernet and surrounded by bottles on all sides, and a computer.

Truthfully, we only have a little over 225 bottles. It’s not that much in the scheme of things I suppose, but it seems that, at times, we have wine in every available wall space. We have 3 small wine refrigerators (we thought surely one would be enough at the time, and so on).

Last night, as we arrived home from Cork and Bottle with a half-case, I realized I had no idea where any of our wine was located. I had pulled up CellarTracker to enter the new wines and noticed how poorly I had kept track of what we drank, what we purchased, and our tasting notes.

I know CellarTracker isn’t as "fun" as a lot of the other wine-based social networking tools. But at its heart, CellarTracker is a useful and powerful database tool. Interacting with others is just a bonus. We tracked all our wine last night. In the end, we have several different (now named) locations, as well as 5 missing bottles. I’m hoping we drank those at some point. We used several of CellarTracker’s reporting functions to pull it all together. I’ve been inputting wine into CellarTracker for several years now, but this is the first time we’ve really used so much of the functionality. (See my post on virtual cellars from May 2006.)

It took hours getting everything organized into locations last night, but it was only the first step in inventory. Next, we need to take some time and try to organize via grape, I think. In the meantime, I can use CellarTracker’s excellent Wine List function to always have a list of our available bottles and their locations.

Until Kentucky recently passed some convoluted laws, we were members of several different winery clubs, including Cline, Gundlach-Bundschu, and Ledson, all out of Sonoma. These three clubs are the reason we have so many wines, I think. There’s something to be said for a regular shipment of wine arriving on your doorstep.