What's Going On in the World of French Wines

Each week I get an email from a local wine store I occasionally frequent in which they feature a “daily wine, “a weekly wine,” and a “monthly wine.” The difference between the three categories is essentially based on price, but the monthly wines tend to be wines that can also benefit from a bit of age. Longtime readers of my blog will know that for the past 3 years, Bill and I have been working on turning a part of our basement into a wine cellar. We are close to being done – Bill just has two more shelves to build and then we should be in good shape. But the question that has bothered me as we have started to get closer to finishing the cellar is what’s the best way to organize my wines?

Today as I looked through the email that featured the daily, weekly and monthly wines, it occurred to me that one way to organize my wines would be to group them into two categories – wines to drink and wines to age. While these days most wines can be enjoyed while still young, as I have mentioned before, there are certain wines that will improve with a little bit of age and if you have the opportunity to age your wines, it is well worth doing so. So now I am thinking that I should divide my wines into two groups that I am going to call everyday and reserve. Within each category I still think that I will break it down by region (as opposed to style or grape variety), but I think that by making the everyday vs special occasion distinction it will help me keep better track of my inventory. And the other added bonus to organizing my wines this way is that I think it will make it easier for my husband to better understand what is ready to drink and what wines I want to set aside for drinking later. Right now if I am out of town and he wants to find a wine to open I think he gets a little frustrated trying to figure out what wines are fair game and what wines I might not be so happy to discover missing.

So what do you all think? I’m still trying to think through the pros and cons of this system, so if anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears! Drop me a line and tell me how you organize your wine collection and what makes you decide if a wine goes into the everyday or reserve category. Do you base it solely on price or something more? If I can get Bill to build the rest of the shelves, I think I might start to tackle this organization project very soon – I’ll keep you posted as to my success!