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.