How do you manage the ageing of your wine bottles ?

A well-ordered wine cellar is the key to success, offering unrivalled ease of retrieval. To achieve this ideal, all it takes is rigorous organization from the outset, and maintaining this rigor throughout the process. From the outset, it's essential to take the time to carefully classify and label each bottle, clearly indicating its category, region of origin and vintage on visual cues such as neck labels. This simple approach will create a clear, coherent structure in your wine cellar and help you find your way around. 

To organize the bottles in your cellar, we recommend that you begin by storing your ageing wines at the back of the cellar, and making ready-to-drink wines (which will normally be consumed more quickly) accessible. After that, it's up to you to classify your wines as you see fit, by appellation, region or vintage. Your cellar should be as organized as possible, so that you can retrieve a wine without having to search for it among all the other references.

At the same time, keeping a cellar book can be extremely beneficial, as it provides an exhaustive inventory of the bottles that make up your cellar. By recording the number of bottles available for each wine, as well as information on the peak date or food pairing, you'll have a valuable tool to help you find your way around your cellar and manage your stock efficiently over time. This booklet will become your personal guide, giving you an overview of your collection and enabling you to make informed decisions when it comes to choosing the perfect bottle for every occasion. And don't forget to make a note in this book of every bottle removed from your cellar, to avoid unpleasant surprises such as the urge to open a particular bottle that is no longer available in your cellar.

There are also cellar books in digital format, such as the U'wine application. This is a very simple way of keeping track of the bottles available in your cellar, thanks to a "tag" placed on the neck of the bottle. Each bottle that has the tag and is scanned by the user appears in his online cellar, which provides all the information on each bottle. To add or remove a reference from your online cellar, all you have to do is move your smartphone a few inches closer to the chip on the neck of the bottle, and the technology takes care of the rest. It's a tool that allows you to manage your cellar in a dematerialized way, which limits stock management errors and is much more spontaneous than the paper format.

By cultivating this organized approach and maintaining the necessary discipline, you will transform your wine cellar into a veritable sanctuary of oenological pleasures, where you can easily navigate and share unforgettable tasting moments with your loved ones.