Organized Wine
I’m leading a book club session at Learning 2007 on the book "Everything is Miscellaneous."
It got me thinking about how I organize – or more appropriately, would
like to organize – my wine. We don’t have a wine cellar, instead, wine
is in three small temperature controlled coolers and then shoved into
every available spot in our house. I do, however, tag our wine. Each
bottle has a hanging tag that lists the type of wine on the front. On
the back it lists the drink by date, where it was purchased, and how
much we paid. In addition to the haphazard physical organization of my
wine, I have most of my bottles logged into CellarTracker. Like most of
these online wine organization tools, it lets me view my bottles by
vintage, purchase location, varietal, and so on. CellarTracker does not
yet use tagging, although I read somewhere that tagging is a coming
upgrade. (Don’t quote me on that though.)
I started wondering how everyone else organizes their wine and it led me to Donna M’s blog.
Donna is an information architect and compulsive organizer. However, if
I had the space, I would organize my wines exactly as Donna has – by
varietal, then vintage, and then with all the other information on my
hanging tags. I don’t see this as a complicated organization scheme.
Where it runs into difficulty is the same place that most physical
organization schemes run into difficulty – when you add a new bottle.
There may not be room for that bottle between 1996 and 1998 Cabernets.
Then what? Years and years ago I worked at a video store. When new
releases came in, we had to move every single movie just to fit in the
new one. It is the bane of the alphabetical and physical world. The
advantage CellarTracker has over physicality is that it also allows me
to note where I stored the wine and sort by storage location as well.
Just some thoughts as my professional world and wine world overlap yet again.
Cross-posted to My Wine Education.
