To get to know and cherish your wine collection, a wine cellar program designed for easy data entry is essential.  It is also important to place your wines effectively.

While you may have, or hanker for, a well designed cellar to store your wines, any spare dark and cool space will suffice and still be called a cellar. 

In this space you should arrange some form of racks, bins or boxes.  Racks are fine, but can be costly.  Bins are good for storing bottles on their side, so long as they will not slither out in an earthquake.  Boxes also work, but while screw capped bottles may be kept standing, corked bottles should lie down.

Using a system that records exactly where each bottle is stored in a rack, means that every bottle has to be placed in exactly the right spot.A better alternative is to identify each bottle with either a numbered tag, printable or write-on tag.

This allows you to place the bottle anywhere in the cellar, although preferably within a designated area, to reduce the number of bottles you search through. 

Of course, a designated area can refer to a box under the bed or in a closet, just as it can refer to a bin or a specific number of columns in a rack.

Some cellarers like to store their wines in spaces allocated for vintages or regions of production.  This can lead to significant wastage of storage space.  Better to store your wines randomly, allowing every space to be filled, and use the computer’s filter and sort functions as you wish.  There is a real pleasure in choosing a long held wine from your cellar-list, and then quickly finding it.

As your collection grows, so your storage space will come under pressure. It is almost inevitable that what ever size you designate for wine storage, it ultimately will restrict the size of your collection.  The lesson from this is to start cellaring now in whatever spaces may be available and plan to create an expansive wine storage facility when time and funds allow.