How to Stock and Organize Your Wine Cellar

So you've just bought a 400-bottle wine cellar, and your 20 bottles of wine are looking pretty lonely in there. Now what?

It helps if you've bought the cellar when good vintages of your favorite wines are on the market. It also helps if you have a bottomless bank account. But here, let's work with conditions that are under your control.

Things You'll Need:

A wine cellar

String tags or other method to label your wines

Subscriptions to one or more reputable wine magazines, or

A good sommelier at a good local wine shop, or

Internet access

Instructions

STEP 1: Know your tastes. And know what you're buying for: to drink or to collect? If you plan to drink all the wines you buy, that would probably lead to a different price point than buying as an investment.

STEP 2: List wines you like, either regions or specific wineries.

STEP 3: In your list, notice which wines benefit from aging and which don't. The better they age, the more space you want to dedicate to them in your cellar.

STEP 4: Consult vintage charts. Of the wines you like, which have good vintages currently on the market? If you target good vintages, you can find second- and third-tier producers who had a great year but still charge reasonable prices based on their long-term reputation.

STEP 5: Once you've identified exceptional vintages, start researching individual producers. Go to tastings, read magazine reviews including the tasting notes, or go online. If you find your mouth is watering while you're reading tasting notes, you're on to something.

STEP 6: Know your reviewers' tastes. For example, Robert Parker has a reputation for loving "fruit bombs," wines in which fruit rather than terroir or other flavor components dominate.

STEP 7: If you're a person who likes variety, consider buying no more than four bottles of any given wine unless it's one you like.

STEP 8: Strike a balance: Know when to pounce on a particularly good wine (they go fast!), but bide your time waiting for those fantastic finds.

STEP 9: When you find the right wine, go for it! If you're buying from a distant source, ask them to store it for you so you can fill a case and ship during cool weather.

STEP 10: When you receive the wine, tag it before putting it in your cellar. On the tag, include at least the wine's name, vintage, and drink dates (like "best from 2014 to 2024"). We also include where we bought it, price, scores, magazine issues in which it was reviewed, number of bottles we bought, total amount produced, and tasting notes.

STEP 11: Put wines that need long aging on the top of the cellar, and wines that are ready to drink on the bottom. Your cellar is likely to be warmer at the top than the bottom, so this promotes the best rates of aging.

If you want to spend your money on wine instead of wine magazines, there are great resources available online. For example, zachys.com publishes scores and tasting notes from several of the most respected wine magazines, often before the issue comes out. Zachys also has a fantastic selection, although you do pay a bit of a premium.

If your wine cellar is the two-bottles-deep variety, buy even numbers of bottles, especially of wines that need to age a long time. This helps you use space efficiently and keeps you from losing track of wines.

I've got a rule of thumb: $10 per point above 90 on the Wine Spectator's scale. That is, I'll pay up to $10 for a 91-point wine, up to $50 for a 95-point wine. I adjust the scale for Tanzer because he scores more conservatively, and I don't buy based on Parker's scores because I like terroir and earth more than fruit and oak. I don't bother with wines below 93 points because I've learned anything less is a disappointment (my mother always did say I have expensive tastes).
Don't fill your cellar with short-lived wines unless you've got definite plans to use them up soon. It's no fun to pass up on great wines because your cellar is full of whites that need to be drunk yesterday.

So you've built up a satisfying selection of wines, but are losing track of what's what, and where? Here's how to bring order back to the chaos.

STEP 1: Gather up the information you have on your wines. At minimum, this includes wine names, vintages, and the number of bottles you have.

STEP 2: Prepare a spreadsheet, preferably in software that lets you sort on any column as Excel does.

Columns you should always include: Wine name, vintage, number of bottles, first year of best drinking, last year of best drinking. Columns that are helpful but not absolutely vital: Country; wine region; appellation; cuvee, vineyard, or other fine-grained information; grape varieties; published scores and who did the rating; where purchased; purchase price; number produced; number purchased; number remaining; location in your cellar; tasting notes.

STEP 3: Depending on how confused your cellar is, you may have to empty it at this point. Bring the computer to the cellar or the cellar to the computer and fill in the information for each wine. For drink dates that start with "Now," enter the current year in the spreadsheet.

STEP 4: If your wines are not tagged, tag them now -- at least one tag for each kind of wine. STEP 5: Put your wine back in the racks and close up your cellar. This might be a good time to get something warm to drink.

STEP 6: If you don't have drink dates for your wines, it's extremely helpful to track them down -- borrow friends' wine magazines, make a trip to the library, or use the general drinking recommendations for entire vintages. Add them to your spreadsheet.

STEP 7: Use this spreadsheet to help you decide what wines to open next. We find the drink dates to be the most-used part of the spreadsheet. With one column for the start of the drink interval, and a separate column for the end, you can sort on either column to help guide you to