Sooner or later, if you’re a wine drinker, and keep buying bottles you’re going to have to buy a wine rack. Don’t fret, it happens to all of us.

I picked up a 36-bottle wine rack at an Indy wine shop several years ago. I also own a couple of chilled storage systems. But as a wine writer, I get samples and buy a lot of wine and for the past few months realized I needed another rack – maybe 24-36 bottles.

I looked at wine shops and found overly decorative, and overly expensive, metal racks that don’t really make those baby bottles feel very safe. I went into home furnishing stores and found more wine racks than I expected but way over-priced and most were more decorative or cute than they were functional.

Then, honestly it’s the old age, I remembered the column I wrote in 2010 about Gerald Radel of Peru, Indiana. Radel builds wine racks – lots of wine racks. His big contract is with Cost Plus World Market. There is a store on Indy’s northside so I scooted to Indy today and they had two different models.

Cost Plus, on 116th street in Carmel for the locals, had Radel’s 44-bottle pine rack for about $70 and a 24-bottle rack for $50. The thing I like about Gerald’s wine racks is they support the entire bottle and they’re sturdy!

So here is a plug for a nice man who makes darn fine wine racks. And here is a link to that 2010 column which tells a bit of the Radel story. There is a link to his website near the end of the post!