How I Use CellarTracker.com to keep track of my Wines

Most people don’t have my problem. They have fewer than 50 bottles of wine. I have a bigger problem. I have wine in multiple locations, including my primary residence’s wine refrigerator, my office closet, my offsite storage, and my vacation home’s wine cellar. I can’t keep that in my head!

With the number of wines that I own, and the drinking and buying dynamic nature of my collection, I can’t keep a dedicated section for a particular varietal or region. You drink a wine, there’s a space, and you put the next wine you purchased in that space. There’s no logic to my cellar!

So I need a wine cellar tracking tool, and I use CellarTracker.com. This is a recommendation, not a referral- there is no financial connection.

Good thing I’m anal, and always “Drink” (the CellarTracker verb for removing a wine) a wine so my inventory stays accurate. I do sometimes sell wine or gift it, but I carefully track that too.

When I buy wine, I add it to my Pending Inventory, and “Accept Delivery” when I get it. It may be a few days before I move it into storage, so I usually Accept Delivery into my “Office”, and move it to its rightful location sometime after that.

I don’t keep careful tabs on my “daily drinkers,” so I have a “Location” in Cellar Tracker for them. I let my spouse drink any of these, and I don’t worry about the inventory.

Everyone has differently shaped physical storage.

My Office has typical wine case boxes (12 bottles), so it’s organized by column and height. Columns are “A” through “E” (first to fifth), and height is 1 to 5. So a wine might be in Close C3. Within that case, I’ll have to find that wine, but I know it’s one of those 12 bottles.

The wine refrigerator in my garage is similarly organized. There are 16 rows, 8 columns, and 2 deep. Each row is numbered 1 to 16. The columns are A to H. And the Front & Rear are “F” and R”. So a bottle in the 5th row, third column, in the back position is 05 C R. I do add the leading zero so every row has two digits.

My offsite storage is just a series of wine boxes in (unfortunately) random order. I probably should fix that, but it’s pretty random which wines I take out of there. So the boxes are simply prefixed with “WB” for Wine Bank. WB 03 or WB 12, etc. This makes sorting and filtering easier.

Finally, my vacation home is called “Dogwood” for the street it is on. I have 7 racks, and each rack has 10 rows and 12 bottles. I don’t worry about the position in the row, just like I don’t worry about the position in the wine boxes in my Closet or the Wine Bank. Dogwood 03 07 would be the third rack and the 7th row.

I always download my inventory from Cellar Tracker and convert it into a spreadsheet. I can then filter by location and find a bottle that is ready to drink quite easily.

It may sound complicated, but it works for me!