In my Manhattan apartment, I have two refrigerated wine storage units. One holds approximately 40 bottles. We outgrew this unit after a few years and added the second, which stores about 200 bottles. While the smaller cellar is a bit empty these days, serving more as overflow, there are only a few slots open in the big cellar.

Out in the country, we store all of our current classroom wines (and a few extra bottles to enjoy with dinner) in the basement of our house. Additionally, we have a third cellar in the classroom, which maintains the wines at two distinct temperatures — cooler (~55 F) for the whites and slightly less cool (~65 F) for the reds — so that we are ready to go for a given class session. A quick glance at Cellar Tracker, our online wine inventory management system, reveals that, in total, we currently have 399 bottles of wine, with another 27 pending delivery (most likely our 2005 Bordeaux Futures).

Yet, when I wanted to open a bottle of wine with dinner last night, I had difficulty finding one. Of course, there were plenty of bottles in the big cellar unit, but so many of them were off-limits. Some of these are wines we have intentionally laid down to age, particularly Bordeaux from the vaunted 2000 vintage. Others are expensive splurge purchases, which require, if not a special occasion, then at least something better than the Lean Cuisine I had selected for dinner. Plus, DH wasn’t at home to share it with me. Still other bottles just seem off-limits because we only have a single bottle and I am loathe to see them go, such as those we recently brought home from Paso Robles, CA.

When we first purchased the large cellar, we had identified three shelves as our house wines — one red, one white and one sparkling. These were to be the wines we could reach for without thought and without having to stop and take formal tasting notes. However, we seem to have drank all of these bottles and filled the shelves with other wines instead. Thus, on any given night, with all of that wine at my disposal, in actuality, the pickings are rather slim.

So, in the end, I decided that hoarding my Channing Daughters Tocai Friulano was silly since it was the 2005 vintage and might lose some of its freshness if I held it too long. Problem solved, at least for now. In the meantime, I should probably choose some new house wines.