How to Organise your Wine Collection
For those passionate about wine, finding a dedicated space for their collection by investing in high-quality wine racks, or better yet, entire wine cellars is essential. However, there is no point forking out on gorgeous wine storage without first deciding upon the best way to organise the bottles themselves.
How you choose to do so is entirely up to you and will certainly depend upon your collection size; but organising by type, grape variety, region and age are generally the most common ways to categorise.
Type
Organising wines by type is great for people with smaller collections and those who are not too picky regarding grape variety or pairings. Amateur collectors can’t go wrong when organising straightforwardly by reds, whites, roses, sparkling and dessert wines.
Grape Variety
The next step up is to arrange by grape variety, allowing collectors to organise more precisely. This ensures your Rieslings are not mixed in with your chardonnays, or your Shiraz bottles with your Sauvignons. Moreover, organising by variety makes food pairings easier and will ensure maximum efficiency when it comes to selecting your perfect bottle for any occasion.
Region
For many wine collectors, there is a tendency to sway towards certain preferred wine regions. If this is you, it might make more sense to organise your collection by grape location, allowing you to group together your favourite bottles based on the country or particular region of origin.
Age
For anyone serious about wine collecting, the age of your wines is a very important factor, particularly since many are supposed to be stored for years in order to reach their peak.
As such, you can also organise large collections based on ideal drinking dates, by keeping ready-to-drink bottles closer to the top, and the ones you do not wish to touch for quite some time at the bottom of the wine rack, or the harder-to-reach areas of the cellar.
This will ensure you are serving wine at their perfect peaks, preventing any undesirable premature openings!
Price
It is more than likely that you will have at least a couple of very expensive bottles within your collection, which you might be saving for a special occasion. We recommend storing your priciest bottles or most superior vintages at the bottom levels of your wine racks or cellar so that you do not find yourself drinking them on an impulse.
Nobody wants to spend a significant amount of time searching for the perfect bottle, particularly when you have guests to host, which is why organising your wine collection is vital for both efficiency and decorative purposes.
At the end of the day, there is no right or wrong way to categorise your bottles – it is simply about finding what works for you.