Bill's Comment Page

At last! I've almost got my wine stock records just about in order

I rarely write here about side issues, but I thought I'd make an exception today. Over the past several days, including part of this afternoon, I've been working to put my wine stock records in order. I'm a keen wine-drinker and over the years have built up a fair 'revolving' stock of wine; some hundreds of bottles.

Over the past 18 months or so, I've badly neglected keeping my stock records up to date, not so much with marking out bottles used, but getting round to adding new wines bought to the records. In a way this hasn't mattered too much because whilst I do buy wine which is used in the six months or so after purchase, I tend to have wines for a few years before I even start to think about using some of them. However, in the past month or two I've wanted to start using an occasional bottle from stock purchased at the beginning of last year and I've discovered through bitter experience that it's too easy to forget what I drank a few days ago, far less a week ago.

Over the past 15 or so months I've bought roughly 14 or so cases (probably a bit more, I haven't tallied it up), some in unmixed dozens, but 4, 6 or 8 bottles of some others, so there are quite a lot of different wines involved - well over 25 I'd say. Anyway, I've now got all the purchases input (I've kept my wine stock records in a database for quite a few years) and have so far got most of the reds marked out for bottles used, to update the paper stock register printouts. I've still to do all the whites and fortified wines - I'm a keen 'amateur' of madeira and sherry and of course port. I hope to get all that done tomorrow - then I'll have a better idea of what I've got and when it needs to be drunk. It's very easy to forget about the last couple of bottles in a case, keep them too long and then find they're past their best - which reminds me, there's a bottle of Hermitage with my name on it for this evening!