Check out that rack!

After my recent lament about running out of storage space for wine — I went ahead and built more space.

Most of the wine closet (located in the basement under the stairs, with one wall against the ground, the others pretty well insulated and cool) had these cool “Vacu Vin Click Bottle Rack” things, which were cheap, sturdy, and flexible to assemble in an odd space.  It also had an (overloaded) wooden wine rack we’d received as a wedding gift.

I pulled the wooden rack out, and (having ordered an appalling number more boxes of clicky wine rack things) I continued to build out the rack forward toward the door, including (since they were so flexible) angling up toward the ceiling.  I also put in a few rows across the back (not visible in the snapshot — which, in fact, doesn’t show the depth of the closet at all).

Result?  Effective doubling of our wine storage, and a much neater space.  (And safer — I went ahead and anchored to the wall both the new and existing racks.)

That’s going to let me finish unpacking the remaining wine boxes on the basement floor.  But it also let me catalog all our ports and dessert wines (the things that were in the old wooden rack).

Good news:  We have a lot of great ports and dessert wines, including some “don’t open for another twenty years” sorts.

Bad news:  We have some very odd ports and dessert wines, too, some of which should have been opened quite a while back.

So insert previous solicitation for doughty volunteers here.  Actually, it’s worse than the normal wine consumption problem, as by the time we’re usually done eating at a Margie-cooked affair, everyone’s groaning and moaning and the last thing they want is a bottle of something sweet and/or fortified.  Which is a shame, because there’s some really great stuff there …

I can attest, by the way, that wine does go bad.  Since I got the collection entered into CellarTracker, I’ve been bringing up overdue bottles of wine (some of them dating back to my Martinez days in ’94).  Results:

• One bottle of syrah, tasteless upon opening, but turning into something palatable after a couple of hours of air.
• One bottle of grenache-zin cuvee, completely soaked cork, not very good to drink.  (I have a duplicate downstairs still.)
• One bottle of merlot (a wedding gift), cork half-bad, bad to drink.

*sigh*  My babies …

So next time you come over, if I seem to be pushing wine on you — well, double-check the vintage (“Wow, they made wine back that long ago?”), but if it looks okay … drink up.  A bottle of wine is a terrible thing to waste …

… but a great thing to track in a database and build storage units for!