Bring on the Wine!

Now that most everything was done, and the racks were mounted, it was time to move the wine. Fortunately my parents have a mini van, and my colleague who was storing the wine had a ton of wine boxes---many of them insulated. So we headed over, pulled and boxed all the wine out of the original cellar, and moved around 900 pounds worth of wine to the new cellar. Here's what the storage room looked like with all the boxes of wine:

From there it was a couple of hours of work loading the new wine room. It was a good time to take inventory, so while I pulled and racked wine, my mother was kind enough to compare inventory against a printout from my latest spreadsheet.

The racked cellar (as of Sept '98) has approximately 300 bottles. The vast majority of the stock are Rhones, with a tiny smattering of California, Bordeaux, a few Pesqueras, and a bit over three cases of various Ports. There's a nice little vertical of Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle, a good variety of Chateauneuf du Papes and Cote Roties, and a somewhat embarrassingly large collection of Guigal single-vineyards (especially La Turque).

I took four pictures and stitched them together into two pictures, left and right:

I really like the diamond bins. It's a good feeling to walk into the room and see nearly a whole bin of '94 La Chapelles, or look to the left and see a veritable mound of '95 Vieux Telegraphes. The room itself is small (taking pictures was a trick), but there's a good 3'x4' space in the center to work in or which can act as case storage overflow if I ever get so out of control as to exceed the current racking capacity.

Once the bottles were racked all that was left to do was mount the thermometers, and attach extra foamboard to the door to help shore up what is probably the weakest part of the thermal isolation.

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