“The average wine collector buys 20 bottles for every 1 consumed.”
Wine clubs backing up, bottles placed errantly in empty slots, wines gifted and thrown in with the rest of your collection, cases left over from events or parties, a sale gets the best of you. It can be entirely overwhelming to keep track of what you have.
Have your tastes changed? Does your collection bring you joy? If you needed a specific bottle, do you know exactly where it is?
I get it, and I see it. Allocations are a great and wonderful thing! Small production bottling's only allocated to club members are exciting, waiting lists years long that you’ve finally gotten on, the temptation of buying pre-arrivals and then forgetting that you’ve ordered them until they arrive three years later, tempting offerings from word savvy somms...I’m guilty of ALL of the above.
When I step into a new client’s wine cellar, it becomes very obvious within a dozen bottle pulls, if they have a system in place. Sometimes I can find remnants of one, and can piece together what they once had envisioned, other times the cellar has ended up looking like the kitchen junk drawer filled with daily drinkers years past their prime, sprinkled with some very high end wines that should not be confused with a bottle that should be opened after a rough Monday.
How to get started
Open all of the wine club boxes and set the bottles in the cellar, recycling the shipping containers. DO NOT remove OWCs (Original Wooden Containers) or OTP (Original Tissue Paper) unless you are absolutely sure that you will not be reselling or gifting the bottles at some point down the line.
Working in sections, pull all of the wines out of their bins, separating the wines that are past their prime into a collection to drink, dump, or donate.
Assess what you have, and organize in a way that makes sense and allows for growth.
Assess if your tastes have changed, and if it would be worth parting with some bottles to make room for new wines that better suit your needs.
Inventory your entire collection and stay on top of it. Find a way to keep track of the bottles entering and leaving your cellar.
Enotrias provides full cellar services. We come in, organize, inventory, and provide a full and detailed spreadsheet, that can include the exact bin, map, and valuation for the entire collection utilizing trusted software. A USPAP compliant valuation for submission to a wine insurance company can also be provided at the conclusion of the inventory. Further services include brokering, donating, and procuring bottles. *Wine Club breakup services are also available.