If you're like any of us here at Belle & Bottle, you've amassed a collection of wine that needs serious storage. I, for one, have a few cases of wine piled up in my office at home in New York, waiting until there's room in my small wine fridge to be placed in the appropriate setting.
When Laura moved into her new home in Nashville, she used a room meant for an office as her wine cellar. Here, she shares details on how she created the perfect space. We also get a glimpse into how she organizes her wine which, when you're on your way to building a decent collection (or just managing one), is incredibly useful.
Transcript
We started with these racks and they are too deep, so… I didn't do my math again right before I got on, but it's over 300 bottles that we were able to do. We have eight rows on the wall and there's two sections for each. We did two sections high and four wide so we've got eight that way. The room itself is set up with the window air unit which we installed to keep the room at a constant 60 degree temperature. It doesn't have a humidity control, but we can keep an eye on that through the house system. As you see, the window could have allowed sun to come in and here it looks pretty bright, but we've got this room pretty dark most of the time. We did a blackout shade on the window.
I've got some wines here in the containers. We did the wall and then we noticed that we ran out of room immediately, so we bought boxes to go on the side so that we could store things that we had more of. If you've got, you know, six of the same bottle, these are great to put in the these boxes. They each have their own little compartment.
A really great example, I think, of the cellar organization is Lynmar. You can see how much I love my Lynmar wine. I've been a member at Lynmar Estates in Sebastopol for years. That was the first wine club outside of Washington that I joined. And I love going down there. They've got a really great program. So I've got everything kind of organized. The newer ones are at the top and then the older bottles are here down at the bottom. And then they've got different single vineyards and things like that. I've got it kind of organized so that way when it's time, if I have people over and I want to drink a bottle, I know I can look here at the bottom and see some of the older vintages. And then also for organization, you know, you can do whatever you like, but I did mine by AVA. So I have California over here and then I kind of move over and then I've got Oregon, Pinot Noirs, then I have Washington and then we've got some imports down at the end. I do have some imports in different spots because the wall has been taken up with California and Washington and Oregon. Over here, I've got the Paso Robles wines and I have Central Coast. You’ll see that a lot of what I have is small producer wineries that we’ve visited.
With the wine clubs, I try to keep everything together. There's Big Table Farm, which we featured in the last newsletter. And Three Sticks up in California, and then on to Washington. I've got some things that are from wine clubs and then trips that we've had where we've kind of pulled special bottles and things like that.
So that's how I do it. There's really no wrong way to do it. I think it's just a matter of what is organized best for you. Some people put things in their cellar based on when they should drink it. So they'll look at the drinking window for a certain vintage from a certain AVA. You can hang a little tag on the neck of the bottle, if your bottles are stored this way and you can’t see what it is. And you can put whatever kind of information you want on the tags. There are a lot of apps that organize your wines, too. I used to have my wine stored at Fennel 55 in Seattle and they have an app so I can see what I had in storage.
Because I can see most of it by coming in the room and looking, I don't use an app. I come in here and pick what feels right or what I'm in the mood for that day. And then I've got most of my whites and champagnes and sparkling wine out in the wine fridge that we have out in the garage. But I do have a few kind of fun ones [sparkling and whites] that I keep in here, that way I've just got some nice champagne on hand and Iron Horse was again another one that we featured.
We've got the room going out into the hall and then we've got some Georgian wines that are over here grouped together. And then I wanted to just do a quick shout out for my friend Richard Duval (artist). I used to have his work in the wine shop in Washington. Each one is a window into a different AVA in Washington state.
And, that's our fun little space that we created to store our wine. Hope it inspires you. Cheers!