One thing about retirement, all that free time you thought you were going to have, is just not there.  On top of it, I have my Bride home every day, even though she is an essential worker, she is working remote and now we both seem to have less time.  You would think that with the elimination of the rush-hour travel time, she could get more time for herself, because the roads haven’t been fixed, but she just seems to work more.  As for me, I just keep giving myself more projects and some of them have been pretty labor intensive.  It all started because we couldn’t go out for dinner anymore, and I started to raid the cellar; and this seems to be a rather common phenomenon among other wine writers as well.  I finally got the majority of the red wines inventoried and I can also look at a chart and know exactly where the bottle is.

The white wines were placed in cartons to be sorted and I decided to finally make use of the wine vault, we have placed in the family room.  Supposedly, one can get two bottles per wire grid cubicle, but that is not always the case.  Some bottles have little or no punt, the indentation at the bottom of the bottle that can help you pour the wine; so some bottles just barely make it, and then other bottles that have long sloping necks can only get one bottle per cubicle, and I think I looked rather strange to my Bride as I would take two bottles at a time to see if they would fit, before I would make a new wine tag and also enter it on my map of the vault.  Also, some of the bottles are heavier and the circumference of the bottles are larger than the cubicle was designed for, so I had to place them on top of the grid work, and it may not look nice, but it works for me.  I was also going to try to get the wines by grape variety, but that didn’t work out to well, so I am glad that I have a map to help me find the wines.  As a side note, there are still white wines that I found still in a couple of the racks that I have not inventoried as of yet.

I have written some articles about some of the wines that were rescued and were still drinkable twenty years later, which is not as big of a deal for plenty of red wines, but the white wines have been dicey as we have been trying our luck.  In the old days when I was a kid, it seemed that more of the white wines were in colored glass bottles, like amber, blue or green, but it seems that most white wines are now in clear glass bottles.  I am not sure if that is a “green” thing or a “marketing” thing, but lately I have seen a couple of articles attacking clear glass for white wines, but I am not going to make any calls one way or the other.  As I was looking at some of the bottles, I cannot remember their provenance and others make me recall how they were our favorite wines and then another favorite wine usurped their position.  Other wines were placed in the cellar and just forgotten about, and some never had a tag made out for the wine initially.  And some were considered too dear for an occasion and then we acquired other wines that were also too dear and wines were put aside and eventually forgotten about.  I am sure that there will be some more surprises and some sad tales in the ensuing years as I try to get it all in a more logical order, but then there is human nature that may bollix everything up again.