If you belong to a wine club and store your wine in your home, at some point you’ll want to optimize the modular storage of your wine. All those wine shipments come in different sizes of boxes, and trying to stack odd-shaped cardboard wine boxes gets tricky and looks messy. After some online research, and taking a peek in other wine storage units, we came across the Weinbox.
What to Consider Before Getting Weinbox Wine Crates
Wine crates are a great way to reduce the footprint required to store wines in a large open space, like an open wine cellar or off-site storage lockers like Extra Space Storage. These open areas, while temperature and humidity controlled, often lack shelving or other structures for storing heavy wines. Without planning, your storage space may end up looking like like this photo - definitely not ideal!
Wine collectors often need to choose between investing in wood storage shelves (see our article on Wine Racks America) or a modular system that allows them to add and remove wines from the storage location for consumption. Wine crates are an attractive option for maximizing storage units that are taller than they are wide, while still enabling for retrieval of wines through a molded “door” on the front and back of the wine crate.
These wine crates are ideal for wine collectors and wine retailers who are storing wines in open areas or in interior closets. An ideal customer would reuse the crates as wines are consumed. Not every wine storage location (cellar, closet, off-site temperature-controlled storage) is amenable to wooden wine racks or a large wine maturation cabinet like Eurocave.
Wine crates like Weinbox are not ideal for wine collectors who have ample shelving or for wine collectors or retailers who are happy with storing their wines in cardboard boxes or wooden shelves.
What is Weinbox?
The Weinbox (Wine is Wein in German) is an injection-molded plastic folding wine crate made in Germany by CABKA, a company that specializes in reinforced and long-lasting plastic products like pallets and industrial boxes - products that are designed for reuse and that are 100% recyclable upon the end of their use. CABKA saw the need for a wine bottle stacking system superior to awkward cardboard box stacking that is not always available with wooden wine rack systems.
The Weinbox is a product that can help with the vertical stacking of a wine collection as a freestanding wine rack, especially in open vertical storage space without shelving. With its lean profile and molded handles, the Weinbox is also good for confidently carrying up to a case of wine between storage locations and up and down a flight of stairs.
The Weinbox wine crate(s) are not intended for use as wine shipping crates. If you need to ship wines in a lay-flat box, we offer an option below.
Weinbox Wine Crate Features and Benefits
Horizontal Wine Bottle Storage with Minimal Bulk
Ideally, wines with cork closures should be stored on their sides to keep the cork moist. A moist cork is important as dry corks allow oxygen into the wine bottle and cause the wine to oxidize. (We discuss this and other wine storage details in our wine refrigeration blog!). The Weinbox holds up to 12-750mL wine bottles in an orderly, horizontal arrangement.
Each individual Wienbox wine crate measures 19 inches long x 10.5 inches wide x 9.75 inches tall (485mm x 266mm x 247mm). An empty Weinbox weighs approximately 3 lbs and 11 ounces. Four Weinboxes take up about the same space as one case of wine in a shipping box.
Weinbox Modular Storage is Dust Repellant
Over months and years, cardboard or wooden wine storage boxes and racks will accumulate dust. In three years, we’ve never had a problem with dust accumulating on the Weinbox crates.
Flexible Bottle Size
Bordeaux, Alsace, Burgundy, Champagne, and oversized California wine bottles all fit in the box, and you can still get 12 bottles per box. It is even possible to store three magnums (1.5 L) bottles in one Weinbox. We’ve been able to fit 18 Alsace wine bottles into one Weinbox.
We recommend that you try to keep like bottles with like bottles (in other words, don’t mix bottle sizes) for neat looking storage. We’ve also noticed, when driving with mismatched bottles in the wine crates, that they make a lot of noise when driving down the road!
Access Wines and Read Label Tags From Both Sides
If you are stacking cardboard shipping containers of wine in a vertical space, chances are the wine you want to consume is buried in the bottom box, and you can’t access it when needed. That’s never a fun situation.
With the Weinbox, individual bottles can be removed from the front or back of the crate (so you don’t need to unstack crates!).
Or maybe you can’t even locate the bottle you want to drink because when the shipping box arrived, you put it in the wine cellar with a bunch of other ambiguous cardboard boxes. Without a good labeling system, it’s pretty hard to find that single bottle of wine. With the Weinbox, each crate can be labeled with A6 index cards, so you know exactly what’s inside. Individual Weinboxes labeled with index cards can be cross-referenced in spreadsheets or wine applications like Cellartracker.
Stackable Modular Wine Storage
An advantage of the Weinbox wine crate modular system is that crates can be stacked up to seven units high. Also, if you have a wine cellar or retail space, the wine crates can double as supports for an impromptu tasting table. Simply make two columns, each four crates high, place a board across the two columns, and voilà, you’re ready for a spontaneous tasting!
Wine Crate Folds Flat for Storage
Most other racks on the market are not foldable, including wooden wine racks. As you consume wine in your collection, you might not need all the wine crates at once. Weinbox crates can be disassembled in under two minutes. Disassembled, 63 crates stack only 2.5 feet high.
How Robust are Weinbox Crates?
Weinbox wine crates have stood up well for us over three years of use. They are made of injection-molded plastic that is intended for industrial use - these crates are much stronger than other plastic crates intended for the home user that one finds at box stores like Target.
We have filled each of our Weinbox crates with 12 to 15 bottles of wine and then carried them up and down flights of stairs. We’ve driven on gravel roads and the interstate with full crates in the back of our crossover SUV, and we’ve moved them through a warehouse on hand trucks to our wine storage locker.
How High can I Stack Weinbox Crates?
In our wine storage locker, we have stacked the Weinbox wine crates 7 crates high and 3 crates wide. At this height (about 5.5 feet) it becomes difficult to hoist additional filled wine crates on top of the 7th layer of wine crates.
Social Proof: Weinbox Wine Crate Reviews
We researched online reviews and videos to see if our experience with the Weinbox was the same as other users.
Most other user reviews were quite positive. These wine crates provided the modular and self-standing wine storage solution that they were looking for.
There were a few users who found the assembly a little tricky, like a complicated puzzle. However, after ten to fifteen minutes of troubleshooting, most were able to assemble each subsequent box in less than five minutes. Our experience was similar: it took about five minutes to get the first one unpackaged and assembled, and the subsequent boxes each took about two minutes to assemble.
Some users who filled their crates with oversized California wine bottles found that the crates bulged a little on the side. We had the same experience. However, the bulging has not presented any problem in stacking the wine crates and has not caused any structural issue with the individual crate.
Alternatives to Weinbox Wine Crate
Storvino Bottle Storage System
The Storvino Bottle Storage system is made in the United States. Each unit holds six wine bottles and is stackable. When stacking, one can use the space on top of the top-most unit to store two or three wines.
Pros:
Sturdy, made of industrial-strength injection molded plastic
Made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic
Cons:
Tight fit for wider bottles like Champagne or Burgundy bottles, you might tear a label if you try to force a big bottle in the hole
No handles for transport
No label holder
Stakrax Stackable Modular Wine Bottle System
The Stakrax Stackable Modular Wine Bottle System is made in Australia and takes a slightly different approach that may suit your wine storage needs. Each unit holds one wine. It might be a good solution if you have an especially narrow space or odd-shaped space you’d like to use for wine storage.
Pros:
Easy to assemble
Best for odd-shaped spaces where one needs to take a “Lego” approach to fit wines
Accommodates Champagne bottles
Cons:
Depending upon the configuration needed, you may need to purchase additional pieces to complete a storage unit
Some buyers mention that they’ve had units arrive to their store or home that are damaged, however it was easy to replace with customer support
Domaine Layflat Bottle Storage Wine Storage Boxes
The same company (Domaine Wine Storage) that is authorized to sell Weinboxes in the United States also sells cardboard boxes that lay flat. This could be a good solution if you are not thrilled with plastic solutions to modular wine storage.
One advantage of using this approach is that all the wine boxes match, making stacking (and moving) easier than utilizing the packaging that wine club shipments come in.
Pros:
Wine modular storage amenable to moving
Cardboard box prevents exposure to light
Cons:
Inserts don’t accommodate all bottle types, they are designed for Burgundy and Champagne bottle shapes
Magnums (1.5L bottles) and exceptionally long Riesling bottles don’t fit
Weinbox Wine Crate Summary
We have been using Weinbox wine crates for three years and really like how they reduce the storage space of wine when compared to cardboard wine boxes. We appreciate that the product is made in Germany and is well constructed. The boxes can also be folded up to store flat. These wine crates have handles which makes it easy to transport wine up and downstairs. The index card system, in combination with the CellarTracker.com inventory system, has solved our wine inventory needs when storing wines at an off-site wine storage locker.
We hope that the Weinbox will serves your storage needs, and that you can finally recycle all those bulky cardboard boxes! Domaine Storage is the only authorized dealer in the US, so get your Weinbox here:
Cheers!