In these harder times the opportunities for buying wine at highly competitive prices are all around us, making the value of cellaring wine higher compared to when things are going well. 

If you ensure that you are buying wines that will keep and improve over the next few years, you are “putting money in the bank”.  

Just like money in the bank, you must ensure that you manage your holdings.  

We read endlessly about temperature, light and humidity for storing wines, but the frequently neglected element is managing your wines.  

It is essential to maintain an accurate cellar list to ensure that your wines will not be opened inappropriately nor will they be held too long for their own good.

Cellaring without accuracy puts all your wine at risk of squandering or spoiling.

The reason that good cellar list management is seldom mentioned is because so many wine cellar software programs fail to provide any aids to maintain an accurate cellar list.  

Vinote provides a unique cellar management system which removes all dependence upon good memory and guarantees an on-going accurate wine inventory.

Your constantly accurate wine list provides you with the confidence to invest in quality wine; you always know what is in your cellar, when it should be opened and where it is.

I regularly receive emails from people who want more information on how to best use barcodes on the wine bottle.

The first thing to know is that the barcode is generally a 13 digit number generated by the winery.  There is no hidden information in the barcode. Some of the digits represent the country of manufacture, some the identity of the producer company, some represent the particular wine and a couple of digits which act as a check sum, ensuring that the barcode has been read correctly.

The action of scanning a barcode simply reads the code as numbers and displays these on the screen, replacing the need to key the numbers in.  The important process follows, where a database such as Vinote Cellar is searched to display the wine details relating to this barcode.  

Vinote Cellar takes the value of barcodes further by printing a unique number and its barcode equivalent on each Vinote Bottle Tag.  This allows the cellarer to identify a wine bottle by scanning the tag’s barcode.  Just as the bottle barcode, through Vinote Cellar, provides details of the wine, the tag barcode provides details of the bottle to be viewed and adjusted; in particular this ensures accurate removal of opened bottles from the current wine list.

Barcodes on bottles and tags, in association with Vinote Cellar, make for accuracy, speed and efficiency in wine and bottle identification.

To read more on this subject Click Here. 

If you enjoy wine, you undoubtedly have a few bottles stashed away, so you are cellaring. 

If you are cellaring you undoubtedly enjoy building up the number of bottles your are stashing.

As your bottle numbers increase you undoubtedly will struggle to find the occasional bottle that you remember has been cellared, but where is it? 

The elusive bottle will have already been opened and the occasion forgotten, or it is hunkering down in some forgotten corner.

This occasional failure will undoubtedly lead you to loose faith in your memory and in you ability to securely store and then find treasured bottles.

The transition from haphazard cellaring to organised cellaring with efficient usage of space and efficient cellar list maintenance, is a simple step. 

Once you have improved space and cellar management your confidence in finding your favoured wines grows and your pleasures in your cellar become truly gratifying.

Vinote Cellar, wine cellar software, is easy to use and enhances the value and pleasure of cellaring. 

There are a great many articles written, on managing a cellar in regard to heat, light and humidity (no longer an issue with screw caps), but seldom do beginners learn of the essentials of managing their wine inventory.  

Wine and memory do not make good bed fellows, so a good inventory system is possibly the most important rule of all.  

Free cellar software, that maintains an accurate summary of what wine is in your cellar and when it is best opened, is easily obtained and can start you off on the right foot, no matter how few bottles you are holding.

However it is not the software that manages your inventory, this must be done by you.  The hard part is remembering the wines you have opened and removing them from your wine cellar software database.  Despite best intentions, empty bottles are tossed away, before their demise has been recorded.  Pledging to remember, to keep a list or to operate the program as you enjoy a wine, are all wasted promises.

Vinote has overcome this gap between memory and inventory accuracy with the use of pre-numbered bottle tags.  

Each bottle is tagged on entry into the cellar and this tag is retained when the wine is opened.  The tags survive for years in the cellar; they will withstand any harsh treatment to ultimately provide the prompt needed to accurately update your database.  Inventory accuracy is maintained.

A cellar without an inventory is a dead cellar.

All wines should be cellared so that the ‘drink now’ wines will be held until called upon and aging wines are held properly for the long hall.

For those being chosen to rest for some time longer in the cellar some simple rules apply.

1. Check out the winery and the wine maker for other vintages. If the winery is new to you, check out its credentials from reviewers and other wine drinkers tasting notes and comments.   Medals from wine competitions can give misleading signals especially as to how wines might age.
2. Taste the wine in a familiar setting. The ambience of where you are tasting can make a difference to your perception, as can the residual flavors of food or other wine. 
3. Mark down bitterness or greenness. These faults are unlikely to vanish with aging. 
4. Don’t mark down leanness or tightness. These will, in the right wines, improve with aging. 
5. Buy a wine that has the flavors and balance you are looking for. Go on, indulge yourself - this is what you are looking for! 
6. Buy enough to follow the wine’s aging. As the wine develops, you want to have enough stored to allow you to open the occasional bottle to test how it is aging. 
7. Maintain an accurate wine inventory, and know where to find every bottle.  The best of wine storage conditions are valueless without an accurate wine inventory, so that your recording of the development of aging wines can be recorded and their future opening dates displayed.

Cellaring wine greatly enhances the total wine experience.  Following these few simple rules guarantees happy cellaring.

Research clearly shows that those who cellar wine drink more wine and derive more pleasure from better wines than those who purchase to drink immediately.  

The reasons for this include the enjoyment of selecting a wine most suitable for each occasion and the offer of a well chosen wine frequently leads to the rejection of an alternative alcoholic drink. 

The same research shows another leap in wine enjoyment for cellarers who maintain an up to date stock list.  

They know that every wine they select will be in the cellar and this confidence of control leads to more valuable wines being purchased.  The ‘hunt and peck’ wine selection process is no longer used and every wine is opened appropriately.

Despite the many words written and spoken about ideal cellar conditions, a cellar with no stock list, or an erroneous one, is as incomplete as a cellar without a door.  

The most important element of storing your wine, for both wine confidence and wine enjoyment, is the maintenance of an accurate wine inventory. 

Vinote Cellar software guarantees this accuracy and by association promises full satisfaction from wine cellaring. 

Too many wine collections suffer from doing nothing. Wine is chosen by memory or inspiration. Beneath this apparently carefree procedure lies a multitude of problems. Many of your wines will fail to catch your eye when they deserve to be chosen and will languish in the wine cellar till they waste away, while others will thrust themselves forward to be chosen at quite the wrong time of their potential lives.

You can choose to do the wrong thing by spending time and effort in recording the location of every bottle in your wine cellar. The reason you will want to do this is to allow you to select a wine from your wine cellar software, go to your racks and find the wine immediately. So what is wrong with this?  The answer is that your computer database will display all the wines which it believes are in your cellar, but there will come a time when you will go to your cellar and discover the wine missing. This is because at some earlier time, you have chosen the wine, drunk it and forgotten to update your database. From this moment on your database is blemished. While the location of bottles may remain accurately recorded, their actual presence is now suspected. Once your inventory becomes suspect the whole effort of organizing a database becomes wasted.  

The right thing to do is to recognize that there is a dichotomy between accuracy and wine drinking and use a system that overcomes these problems. By tagging every wine, the specific location becomes less important but you will always find your wine and your inventory will always be accurate. Numbered Vinote Wine Bottle Tags allow you to find your wine with ease, within a general area, and then become the memory prompt to later update your inventory. 

Given that there is work involved in organizing a cellar, it is essential that you start with a system that will have ongoing stability and accuracy. Regard inventory control as your prime objective and your cellar will remain organized for ever. Vinote Wine Cellar Programs make the whole process so easy.

To get to know and love your wine collection, you must know what wines are there to love.

The final act is to successfully remove each and every opened bottle from your wine database to ensure that your affections are for real bottles.

If you have used the Vinote system, you can relax.  All you have to do is retain the tags of opened bottles. Then, at a time that suits you, take the tags to your computer and, using the tag numbers as the reference (scanning the tag barcode if you have a scanner), remove each bottle from the database.  

If you don’t use Vinote tags, you have to recall every bottle opened.  This means that you must enter the removal of the bottle as you take it from the cellar (remembering that bottles are often returned to the cellar unopened), retain the bottle till you have approached your computer (beware of the tidying spouse on the morning-after), or maintain a list of opened bottles for entering in your computer at a later time.

Wine and memory make bad bedfellows.  Years of observation of cellars convinces us that most untagged cellars are inaccurate and unloved.  An inaccurate cellar list is almost valueless as a tool for wine selection.  

All cellars need an occasional stock take.  Printing a Location Report from Vinote Cellar and checking your bottle tags against this report will quickly bring your cellar-list back into a state of total accuracy and rebuild your knowledge and love of the wines therein.

All your stored wines should be accurately recorded in a database so you can really know them.  Once this is achieved, the process of selecting a wine is easy.

Assuming that your database program has separated out the elements of each wine record, as Vinote Cellar does, you simply choose the most important aspect of the wine you wish to select, then filter, search or sort to display your selection.

Let’s assume you are looking for a wine to go with fish and you decide you want a white wine. Your first action is to filter to only show White Wines.  Or you may decide you want a Pinot Gris, in which case you would filter for your choice of variety.  Once you have reduced the wine list to a manageable size, you use the sort function to have the list displayed in order of your priority.  For example, to find wines that are ready to open you may sort by “Peak Year”, or to select a wine within your preferred price range, you would sort by “Price”.

Each of these sorts takes an instant to display and you can flick from one sort to another to quickly finalise your choice.

Having chosen your wine, you note the bottle’s location in the cellar and, if you are using the Vinote tags, you note the last three digits of the number on the bottle tag.  

Finding the bottle using the tag number is straightforward.  You will be amazed at how quickly you can find a single number among 4 or 5 dozen bottles.

Finding the bottle, using an exact location as specified in the database, is also very easy, providing you have not moved it.

Getting to know and love your wine collection is very much tied up with knowing what is, not what might be, in your collection and knowing that when you have selected a wine, you will always find it.

All of the comments shown below have been made to me over the years.  It is time I shared them along with my responses.

“I never keep wines long enough to make a cellar worthwhile”

I developed Vinote because I suffered from this problem.  By tagging each wine and then referring to the wine cellar software to choose a wine, I quickly controlled my impetuousness and my cellar grew in quantity and quality.  I learned that the essence is to distance the selection process from the actual presence of the bottles.  Bring the two together and the temptation to grab a sacred bottle becomes overwhelming.

 “I can’t afford a cellar”

You can’t afford not to!  If you drink wine, you need a cellar to hold the wines you can buy at bargain prices as well as the precious gems that you want to save for the right occasion.  Buying wine on the as-you-need-it basis is an expensive means of enjoying wine.

“Cellaring is for others”

If you enjoy drinking wine or entertaining with wine, then cellaring is for you.  It will save you money and you will quickly develop a higher level of wine confidence.

“I enjoy discussing the wines I am buying with the retailer”

You will enjoy it even more if you were buying for your cellar.  The same advice will be much more freely given when the retailer knows you are going to cellar it.

“I only buy discount wines which don’t deserve to be cellared”

Discount wines are some of the best to cellar.  Buy in bulk and enjoy at your leisure, but buy a variety in bulk and then spread your wine enjoyment, rather than drinking case by case. 

“I don’t drink enough wines to make cellaring worth while”

Even the occasional wine drinker will gain more pleasure at lower cost by cellaring wine.

“I haven’t got time to accumulate wines”

If you have time to make your ad hoc purchases, you certainly have the time to buy in bulk and cellar, leaving you more time to enjoy your wines.

“I haven’t got space for a cellar”

We know of many cellarers who store their wines under beds, stairs and in the bottom of broom cupboards.  Your wine does not have to be stored all in the same place.

“I don’t know what wines to put in a cellar” 

Starting a cellar is the best way we know of developing wine knowledge and confidence.  When you find a wine you like, buy a few extra and put them away.

“I don’t know when to open wines that I am holding”

Once you have a collection, the act of choosing a wine becomes much easier.  Vinote Cellar and other systems provide best drinking dates which assists in making a decision.

“If I had any more wines I would not know where to find one”

Vinote Cellar makes this job very simple and easy.  You select your wine for drinking from the software and you find the selected wine by seeking a tag number, easily seen within 50 others.

“I can’t be bothered with all the fuss that is associated with cellaring”

There are two answers to this.  Firstly your investment in wine deserves better treatment and secondly your wine pleasures are being limited.  Even if you can afford to ignore the care and attention due to your wines, it is sad to think that you are ignoring the opportunities for wine pleasures by failing to manage your wines. 

“I have a cellar and I know where all my wines are and when they should be opened”

In 12 years of advising and observing wine cellarers, I am yet to find one who knows where all their wines are, when they should be opened and which is the optimum wine to be opened for each occasion.

“How does Vinote differ from other wine cellar software programs?”

Vinote is unique in its approach to wine cellar inventory control.  

By tagging each bottle with a uniquely numbered tag which is recorded in the database, Vinote removes the temptation to select a bottle using the pick and peck method – the first breakdown of a good cellar. Vinote allows you to keep your inventory management well separated from the act of enjoying the wine – a badly managed inventory is the death knell of a good cellar.  

Vinote Cellar offers a huge database of wines and a growing number of tasting notes and drink by dates for everyone to share.