Tips for Organizing Your Wine Cellar

Tips for Organizing Your Wine Cellar

Organizing a wine cellar is not an easy task. One thing to keep in mind is that organization is very important because you will be spending way too much time trying to figure it out where is that bottle you were looking for. If this happens too often, you will have a problem in your wine cellar. Who wants to spend that much time when guests are invited? Or when you want to just seat and relax drinking your wine? This guide is not an absolute guide but it is a beginning for organizing your wine cellar.

Step 1: Make Your Wine Cellar Inventory
This is a very important step. You must make an inventory dividing your wine bottles by categories. You want to write down the number of bottles, year, and type of grape. There are many ways to do this. We recommend to keep the categories simple. Wines are very complicated and categories can expand a lot. But, we want you to have a quick access to your bottles. The best way is to have only 2 drill down categories. For example, 2 bottles Shiraz Year 2012. That is it. You could divide them by region or country but that would make this step more difficult without a real reason. A major category for your wine collection can be: Red, white, rose, dessert and sparkling. Then after this you can subcategorize by decades and types of grape. For example, Red -> Cabernet Sauvignon -> 2002 -> Reserve

Step2: What are the sizes of your bottles?

Usually, bottle sizes are standard. But, in some cases, there are different sizes and shapes of bottles. We must address these different types of sizes of bottles.

Wine bottle dimensions and wine bottle shapes vary. Wine bottles typically measure 3 to 3.2 inches in diameter and are about 12 inches tall. Champagne comes in slightly larger containers that measure up to 3.5 inches in diameter and closer to 12.5 inches tall in 750-milliliter amounts.

Many traditional wine bottle sizes are named for Biblical kings and historical figures. The chart below lists the sizes of various wine bottles in multiples relating to a standard bottle of wine, which is 0.75 litres (0.20 US gal; 0.16 imp gal) (six 125 ml servings). The "wineglassful"—an official unit of the apothecaries' system of weights—is much smaller at 2.5 imp fl oz (71 ml).

Most champagne houses are unable to carry out secondary fermentation in bottles larger than a magnum due to the difficulty in riddling large, heavy bottles. After the secondary fermentation completes, the champagne must be transferred from the magnums into larger bottles, which results in a loss of pressure. Some believe this re-bottling exposes the champagne to greater oxidation and therefore results in an inferior product compared to champagne which remains in the bottle in which it was fermented.

The different sizes of bottles are explained here:
Split
187 ml
Half-Bottle
Holds 375 ml or one half of the standard bottle size.
Bottle
Holds 750 ml - the standard size.
Magnum
Two bottles or 1.5 litres.
Double Magnum
Twice the size of a magnum, holding 3.0 litres, or the equivalent of 4 bottles.
Jeroboam
There are two sizes of Jeroboams: the sparkling wine Jeroboam holds 4 bottles, or 3.0 liters: the still wine Jeroboam holds 6 regular bottles, or 4.5 litres.
Rehoboam
Champagne only - 4.5 litres or 6 bottles.
Imperial
Holds 6 litres or the equivalent of 8 bottles. Tends to be Bordeaux shaped.
Methuselah
Same size as an Imperial (6 litres) but is usually used for sparkling wines and is Burgundy-shaped.
Salmanazar
Holds 12 regular bottles (one case), or 9.0 litres.
Balthazar
Holds 16 bottles or 12.0 litres.
Nebuchadnezzar
Holds 20 bottles of wine or 15.0 litres.  

Step 3: Tag all your bottles
With wine tags we recommend to have different colors for the different types of wine, starting with the biggest category: red, white, rose, etc. It is recommended to choose wine bottle tags that permanent markers can write on them.
Click here for getting your wine tags for your bottles.

If you have any questions, please call us: 713-224-3333 we will be happy to assist you. Or let us call you.

Recent Projects