Cellar diary

[uncle tom]

Might we have a photograph of your pine cupboard, please?

If I can remember how..

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=65 ... 5591415821

[JacobH]

I really like that. I might have to steal the idea, perhaps with slightly fewer bottles. I like that you have space to keep all the bits and pieces that accumulate.

[uncle tom]

I really like that. I might have to steal the idea, perhaps with slightly fewer bottles. I like that you have space to keep all the bits and pieces that accumulate.

I found a guy on eBay making cupboards from reclaimed pine. The width was perfect, but his standard shelf height was too high to fit a bottle on the top shelf. I asked him if he could make me a special with a lower shelf, and he happily obliged.

[nac]

A case of Vesuvio '95 liberated from its case today, the case itself somewhat battered as it had long since been deprived of it's cardboard outer, so will go on the pub's kindling pile. But what to do with the pottery bin tag? Seems such a waste to bin it.

Our friend GEAG might be interested?

[winesecretary]

@ nac - Thank you, but GEAG's bin-label-collecting friend has the 1995...

[uncle tom]

October 3rd

I wanted to have a look at bottle 828A - a lone bottle of Sandeman '54 - or is it '34..? I've plenty of Sa34 but the '54 is rare and the capsule is a bit ambiguous. I wanted to have another look at the capsule to see if I could era date it. Computer said location code 06J18 - but there it was not..

I went into detective mode. Everyone puts bottles in the wrong place from time to time, having some systems in place to help trace errant bottles can be helpful.

Had it been drawn in a busy moment and consumed, with no record kept? Easily done. To guard against this I have two safeguards; first is the neck tag that is always cut off and put in a basket before the bottle is removed from the cellar. Until three years ago these tags had no dedicated home in the cellar. Very occasionally one might get mislaid. I then acquired a bottle that came complete with a pouring basket, which was effectively re-purposed as a tag repository. When did I last inspect this bottle? - last year. The introduction of the basket and lack of social events since it was last inspected made it very likely that it was still in the cellar - just somewhere else.

My second safeguard is that I forbid myself from entering the cellar unless sober. Spur of the moment, rule breaking excursions below stairs are not permitted.

So I checked the written record of the last inspection - no new storage location recorded - but did I forget to note it..?

My next tool was my rack mapping software, which maps the location of every bottle on to a spreadsheet matrices, and throws up alerts if two bottles appear to occupy the same spot. I've not run this tool for some time, and running it threw up two queries.

Errors resolved, I printed out maps of the racks to look for holes that should be empty - but were not.

This revealed my wayward bottle in position 07B04 - moved, but erroneously not recorded.

And is it 54 or 34? I'm still not sure. The wax capsule type I've seen before, but don't still own an example to compare it too. Annoying. I'll leave it booked as '54 until we next have a Sandeman vertical - if it turns out to be twenty years older than expected, I doubt many will grumble..

[M.Charlton]

October 3rd

I wanted to have a look at bottle 828A - a lone bottle of Sandeman '54 - or is it '34..? I've plenty of Sa34 but the '54 is rare and the capsule is a bit ambiguous. I wanted to have another look at the capsule to see if I could era date it. Computer said location code 06J18 - but there it was not..

I went into detective mode. Everyone puts bottles in the wrong place from time to time, having some systems in place to help trace errant bottles can be helpful.

Had it been drawn in a busy moment and consumed, with no record kept? Easily done. To guard against this I have two safeguards; first is the neck tag that is always cut off and put in a basket before the bottle is removed from the cellar. Until three years ago these tags had no dedicated home in the cellar. Very occasionally one might get mislaid. I then acquired a bottle that came complete with a pouring basket, which was effectively re-purposed as a tag repository. When did I last inspect this bottle? - last year. The introduction of the basket and lack of social events since it was last inspected made it very likely that it was still in the cellar - just somewhere else.

My second safeguard is that I forbid myself from entering the cellar unless sober. Spur of the moment, rule breaking excursions below stairs are not permitted.

So I checked the written record of the last inspection - no new storage location recorded - but did I forget to note it..?

My next tool was my rack mapping software, which maps the location of every bottle on to a spreadsheet matrices, and throws up alerts if two bottles appear to occupy the same spot. I've not run this tool for some time, and running it threw up two queries.

Errors resolved, I printed out maps of the racks to look for holes that should be empty - but were not.

This revealed my wayward bottle in position 07B04 - moved, but erroneously not recorded.

And is it 54 or 34? I'm still not sure. The wax capsule type I've seen before, but don't still own an example to compare it too. Annoying. I'll leave it booked as '54 until we next have a Sandeman vertical - if it turns out to be twenty years older than expected, I doubt many will grumble..

The discipline required to forbid oneself from entering the cellar unless sober is undoubtedly up there with one of the most commendable things I’ve ever heard. So for what it’s worth, Tom, I commend you.

[uncle tom]

October 15th

Summer is a'going out.. as I opened the door to my holding cellar today, the air coming out felt warm. I don't monitor cellar temperatures religiously; I do have a data logger, but it's apt to run down when I'm not looking, and it takes an odd sized and expensive battery. A thermometer on the wall has been reading very close to 60F since June - the seasonal temperature change in this cellar does not seem to follow a sine curve so much as a summer plateau and winter plateau.

A little unremarkable pottering around of late - a case of Noval '95 has been prised, chalked weighed and returned, and a little search for an AWOL case of three Taylor VVV 2000 was successful. I have four of these, so will open one soon to get some bottles chalked and weighed.

Have been happily drinking through the Rosebery stash, picking off the ones with no discernible ID, and my impression of old Rioja's has improved considerably as a result. There's about a dozen old bottles in the stash with clear ID and in good order that would easily make £50 a go at auction, so I'm well pleased with my bargain.

A little session of recording consumed bottles taking tags from the cellar basket, a glorious Taylor 60, a young Eira Velha '87 with just the faintest hint of VA, and a very uninspiring Delaforce '85. This is not a faulty '85 but it is hard to credit it as being of vintage quality. Also consumed recently was a very nice standard Noval tawny, with around 20-30 years of bottle age, and a very elegant bottle of Borges VVV - bottled in 1947 and probably 30 or so years old at the time.

Next in the decanter, a very old bottle of Graham's six grapes with ancient label and driven cork, probably around a half century old. Since buying the bottle eight years ago I've been vaguely keeping it for an interesting occasion, but as I have many other interesting bottles, think I'll drink it through instead..

[uncle tom]

November 2nd

I keep most of my cellar data on two Excel spreadsheets. One has formatted basic data on every stash and a variety of analytical tools, occupying 5Mb. The second is a wholly unformatted data sheet that carries all my notes and details of every bottle. It is normally hidden and not edited directly, taking instruction from the first sheet and saving data from it, it occupies 2Mb.

Putting all the data on one spreadsheet would result in a heavy and slow file.

I was aware that my backup systems were not perfect, that the two sheets needed to be backed more frequently, and simultaneously. I had started writing code to do this automatically - but had not got it operational yet.

Then I recently discovered an issue with my Excel Vba coding - a corrupting influence had crept in. At first I thought I had accidentally overwritten a single character in the code, then I suspected I had run a Ctrl+H to replace text in a routine and accidentally replaced everything in the project, but the potency of that tool and the potential for calamity is such that I very rarely use it, and only then with huge care. Was it the legendary 'digital decay' - had it simply corrupted itself?

I'm still not 100% sure. What I do know is that I ran a corrupted routine which in turn mucked up a load of data, and worse, I didn't spot the problem for a couple of weeks. The backups being out of sync complicated matters.

What I did have were saved written cellar notes, and a scanning routine I wrote some time ago that tests all the data entries and looks for irregularities.

The scanning routine takes about a minute to work through the 13000 lines of the database. It threw up about 200 errors.. At one point I was tempted to call time on the restoration and accept that I really don't need my TN on a bottle of Cockburn Special Reserve drunk in 2009; but, in for a penny..

I think I've got it mostly sorted - I hope fully sorted now - and the reform of my backup regime now enjoys top billing..

[JacobH]

At one point I was tempted to call time on the restoration and accept that I really don't need my TN on a bottle of Cockburn Special Reserve drunk in 2009; but, in for a penny.

I think that was a wise decision. I am still annoyed that I did not regularly date my tasting notes before 2010 and therefore, whilst I have managed to reconstruct some of the dates from big tastings, I cannot quite work out the date of many of the Ports I drank at home between mid-2007 and 2010...

[jdaw1]

From time to time, email somebody both spreadsheets.

[MigSU]

From time to time, email somebody both spreadsheets.

Ideally himself
I do that from time to time with some documents, using two e-mail accounts.

[uncle tom]

From time to time, email somebody both spreadsheets

Yes having a distant copy stored is a good idea - no-one knows what will happen if we get a repeat of the 1859 solar storm - an awful lot of data could get fried..

[Steve Veness]

Might we have a photograph of your pine cupboard, please?

If I can remember how..

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=65 ... 5591415821

Ok, I've got to ask, if you don't mind me asking: What's the machine below the cupboard that looks like a lathe without a bed?

[uncle tom]

Ok, I've got to ask, if you don't mind me asking: What's the machine below the cupboard that looks like a lathe without a bed?

It's a 1930's Colchester lathe, slightly stripped down, but I still have all the bits - the bed is still there but is now the base of my work bench.

[Steve Veness]

Ok, I've got to ask, if you don't mind me asking: What's the machine below the cupboard that looks like a lathe without a bed?

It's a 1930's Colchester lathe, slightly stripped down, but I still have all the bits - the bed is still there but is now the base of my work bench.

Very nice. I have a 1956 Boxford model A which I stripped down and rebuilt.

[Glenn E.]

From time to time, email somebody both spreadsheets.

Or, you know, store it in the cloud and edit it from there. I use both Dropbox and Google Drive for active cloud storage, and also have Microsoft OneDrive and Amazon Drive accounts that back up photos from my phone. All are free except for Google Drive, which I finally decided to upgrade to the minimum 200 Gb plan for $2/month (I think... whatever it is, it's cheap).

[MigSU]

Yes, I have my spreadsheet online as well (synched to be accessible offline - the reception in my cellar is simply horrendous, both wifi and mobile signal - it's underground and has stone walls).

[winesecretary]

@MigSu - Poor internet connectivity from one's cellar is indeed a common problem... as you say, they tend to be underground and abundantly walled. Perhaps I will come up with an expensive bespoke solution (#winefi?) as a retirement business.

[uncle tom]

Out with the old...

My last bottle of port for home drinking in 2021 - the last bottle of T55 from a rough stash bought 11 years ago, is drinking nicely, if a little evolved. I have better stashes in the shadows for the future. Have also just finished a '64 claret from the Rosebery stash. Exact name of the producer not clear, but English bottled and in very good order. Just fifteen bottles left from that stash now.

Have extracted some baskets of wine from cellar 3 to fill gaps in cellar 1 - Gibson shiraz '04, Beaucastel '95, d'Issan '97

New induction and inspection schedules up to speed for the year and logged. First stash of 1998 (Vargellas) sitting in the wings ready to be selected by the 'puter when it gets round to it.

- And my pub manager fell downstairs yesterday - managing to break her wrist (quite badly) ankle and ribs..

[jdaw1]

- And my pub manager fell downstairs yesterday - managing to break her wrist (quite badly) ankle and ribs..

Ouch. We wish her a good recovery.

[uncle tom]

In with the new..

Whilst manning a very quiet pub today I have done the annual task of cutting neck tags for the year. I make these by guillotining down strung luggage tags, four at time on an old fashioned lever guillotine, 200 in total. These are then stored in a couple of Vesuvio single bottle boxes.

Before going to the pub I printed a load of cellar record sheets for the new year. For no particular reason I wrote a bit of code to give them serial numbers when they print out.

I've run my 'Choose bottle' routine - by far the longest bit of Excel vba code I've ever written, to select my first flight of home drinking VP bottles for '22

And the 'puter's choices are:

1) First bottle: SFE (Tesco) '94
2) Over Stock: Dow '77
3) High ullage: Croft '70 (level: VTS)
4) Not recently drunk: Fonseca '80
5) Drink up: Sandeman '75 (Seepage and poor level, runt of a recently bought litter)
6) Last bottle: Smith Woodhouse '85 (Second of a pair bought in 2005)

[uncle tom]

Winter is not a great time to be fussing around in the cellar, but in the heat of summer it is delightfully cool.

Recent tasks have included inspecting a clutch of centenarian bottles and some nearly that old, all previously weighed and inspected at least five years ago. Highest ullage rate was recorded on a Burmester 1922 at 360mg/p.a. lowest on a Taylor '24 at just 19mg/p.a.

The general principle that ullage rates over 200mg demand consumption or waxing within a few years, whilst rates over 400mg demand more urgent attention seems sound.

Then there was an owc to be cracked, a case of W77 I'm sharing with WS. Always a bit of trepidation when opening an owc that old.

The large railway screwdriver I secured on eBay a few years back could have been custom designed for prising owcs. As usual nails and staples are left sticking up after top boards are removed, which can all too easily catch a casual hand so I always lever them out or knock them down before proceeding to unfold the Symington cardboard inners.

And within.. - a dozen tidy bottles, with decent levels and no selo stains - Excellent!

[jdaw1]

I am pleased that the cellar diary has resumed.

large railway screwdriver

What is a L.R.S.?

[uncle tom]

What is a L.R.S.?

A super-sized screwdriver, typically 18" long with a blade half an inch wide. There are a few currently on eBay

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vintage-LNER ... 7675.l2557

[uncle tom]

So.. what is the general perception of the difference between a T-stopper and a driven cork?

That one is for the short term and the other for keeps?

Well, I don't have a huge number of T-stoppered bottles that have been weighed more than once so their ullage rate can be calculated; but a couple of recent second weigh-ins have delivered rather surprising results:

Taylor 1971 LBV - 37mg p.a. - over five years
Graham 1979 LBV - 56mg p.a. - also over five years

Only a couple of snapshots, but these numbers are well below the average for driven corks of similar age..

[Glenn E.]

So.. what is the general perception of the difference between a T-stopper and a driven cork?

I have only ever had a single bottle sealed with a t-stopper that was a leaker. It was recent (a 2019 bottling of S. Leonardo 40 Year Old) and the t-stopper broke as I attempted to open the bottle. That revealed the vein running through the cork which was the cause of both the leak and the breaking. In short, the t-stopper was flawed but the flaw wasn't visible from the outside.

I have had many, many leakers sealed with driven corks.

However...

The vast majority of my bottles sealed with t-stoppers are young and intended for relatively immediate consumption. I cannot recall any bottles more than 20 years old in my possession, though I did once get to partake of a bottle from the 1970s. (It had not leaked.) I may have older bottles that I simply cannot recall at this moment, but at minimum they are few and far between.

The vast majority of my bottles sealed with driven corks are intended for long-term storage, and the leakers have all been bottles that are 40+ years old (meaning 40+ years in bottle).

So it's not exactly a fair comparison, at least for my bottles. My less-than-20-years-old t-stoppers have been quite successful at preventing leaks, while my leakers have all been at least 40 years old. This works doubly in favor of the t-stoppers, because they are both younger and have therefore had less time to leak, and are likely harvested/created using more modern technology so therefore less likely to leak in the first place because they're likely made to higher standards with more precise equipment.

My guess is that t-stopper leakage would increase dramatically as the bottles approached and passed 40 years of age, but my own personal experiment will likely never bear fruit as I would be in my 70s at minimum before any of my t-stoppers reached that age, and that's only if I managed to not drink them before then.

[PhilW]

So.. what is the general perception of the difference between a T-stopper and a driven cork?
That one is for the short term and the other for keeps?

I would expect a T-stopper to be used where a convenient method of repeatedly opening and resealing the bottle is wanted, with no expectation of long term storage; bottles might well be shipped and kept vertical, reducing the quality/length of requirement for watertight seal. No ageing planned so no air exchange through cork expected.
I would expect a driven cork to be used where a good quality seal is wanted, typically with the expectation of the bottle being shipped and/or stored horizontally, and often such that the bottle may be kept for many years; in some cases this latter would be a primary requirement such as ageing of vintage port, and the seal is required to provide a level of gas permeability.
So for me, while T-stopper is likely generally unsuitable for long (typically may be a less capable seal, and less able to offer permeable gas exchange) that doesn't mean some T-stoppers might be capable (especially on the seal aspect), but that driven corks may be used for short or long as well depending on other aspects of the use case/requirements.

[uncle tom]

I have only ever had a single bottle sealed with a t-stopper that was a leaker.

In your neck of the woods, I suspect there's very little secondary market trade in T-stoppered bottles. In the UK, small stashes of assorted, and sometimes interesting older bottles turn up quite often in house clearance auction sales.

Three years ago, a 23 bottle stash of Dow 2006 LBV I secured had one bottle with a bad leakage problem and two more with a slight issue - a little worse than I would have hoped to find, but no great surprise, and due to occasional physical defects in the stoppers as you noted, not age related degradation.

[uncle tom]

I've always been a bit of a 'systems guy' - working out solutions and then refining them.

My working assumption with weighing young bottles was that an interval of at least six years, and preferably a little more, would usually flag up those bottles with corks that were likely to be early candidates for ullaging.

However my early weighing of bottles focused on older ones and only now have I been able to test my six year rule on a young stash.

The subject was six bottles of Fonseca 2004 Crusted, first weighed 12 years after bottling and yesterday again after 18 years.

I weigh to a resolution of 0.1g and the weight loss after six years revealed three bottles with a loss of 0.2g, two bottles losing 0.1g and one with no measurable loss at all. In terms of mg p.a. these figures compute at 33, 16 and zero.

This ullage was a little less than I would have guessed. Does it compromise my system?

The bottles were young, I don't first weigh VP until at least 18 years old, and the average age is closer to 30 years. Moreover my six year interval is designed to be a minimum rather than typical time separation.

The figures do also separate the bottles into sheep and goats, and had there been a really poor cork in there, it would have stood out.

Does my system need a tweak? I think for now it doesn't.

[Doggett]

I am just wondering why you don’t weigh them as soon as you have them physically to give you a base measurement. Starting at 18 years seems like it may miss being able to spot a trend of loss at an earlier point. Or is that being completely silly?

[uncle tom]

I am just wondering why you don’t weigh them as soon as you have them physically to give you a base measurement. Starting at 18 years seems like it may miss being able to spot a trend of loss at an earlier point. Or is that being completely silly?

From a practical stance, although I am now up to 37 wine racks, I am still reliant on keeping a large percentage of stock in stacked cases.

Ullage rates of bottles with poor corks may not be that linear over time. Good corks have an even response to lateral compression along their length, but corks that are uneven in that regard, tend to make a poor fit along part of their length and a very tight fit along a small section. They may as a result offer a very good seal during their initial years but then deteriorate more rapidly later as the wine saturates the dense section. This could cause a long window between first and second weighing to throw up a misleading result.

From an aesthetic point of view, wooden cases are also remarkably good at preserving labels; whilst obviously keeping out dust, cobwebs etc., the wood also seems to regulate humidity and deter label degradation. Cases have to get pretty wet before the labels inside suffer.

Whisky tubes also keep the bottle labels very fresh - I sometimes wonder whether a wine rack made from cardboard tubes, glued together, would function better than the traditional open design.

[JacobH]

Whisky tubes also keep the bottle labels very fresh - I sometimes wonder whether a wine rack made from cardboard tubes, glued together, would function better than the traditional open design.

That’s an interesting question. Might have problems with strength, though? Particularly with uneven loading or the like? I wonder about PVC piping as an alternative?

[uncle tom]

That’s an interesting question. Might have problems with strength, though? Particularly with uneven loading or the like? I wonder about PVC piping as an alternative?

The only way to work out strength would be to trial a range of wall thicknesses. A rigid frame or tie straps to stop the tubes from flattening would be needed. I suspect the material empathy of wood and wood derived products such as paper and card is significant. Plastic might work provided the humidity was assuredly low, however any condensation would probably leave its mark on the labels.

[uncle tom]

Another case inspected, this time a Gould Campbell '85, the remaining eleven bottles after the case was originally opened for the Nov '15 '85 horizontal, with the bottles first weighed soon after.

Levels good, all in neck, and ordered according to visual level. Two of the bottles had stained selos, but as they were not aromatic I did not mark them down as seeping. Was that correct? - the re-weigh would tell.

After second weighing yesterday, the ullage rates range from 16mg p.a. (2 bottles) through 31mg p.a. (3 bottles) 47mg (3 bottles) 63mg (2 bottles) and one bottle at 78mg

The correlation between visual level and ullage rate is very loose; even after 35 years since bottling, variation in original fill is clearly the dominant influence.

And as for the two with stained selos? One was at 63mg ullage - toward the higher end of the spectrum but possibly too low to stain a selo, and the other was one of the 16mg bottles.

This rather confirms my suspicion that dry stains on selos are mostly caused by messy bottling lines, rather than seepage.

[mosesbotbol]

@uncle tom - Wow consistent are the weight of empty bottles of the same type?

[uncle tom]

Wow consistent are the weight of empty bottles of the same type?

Empty bottles seem to be more constant in weight back in the sixties than they are today. Reason? - because (I think) with new bottle making technology they could; before realising that this new found ability didn't make them any money, so they stopped bothering about it.

A more recent trait I've noticed is variable visual fill levels, but with very consistent weights; hinting that some bottling lines may use weight as a signal to stop filling - however I'm not not 100% certain about that - it's a 'work in progress' in this camp.

[winesecretary]

The last two paragraphs admit of an alternative explanation. Weight now irrelevant, as filling system accurately delivers 750ml in finished product. In the days when filling systems depended on weight of bottle + liquid, reliable weight of bottle mattered.