I am thinking I want to keep them on. I have a few of these boxes. That means you can make stackable wine racks.
To start, make some templates of the wine bottle girth. By lying the bottle in the box, you can get an idea of how the bottle will sit. Remember, the bottle should tilt towards the cork. You can achieve this by making the bottom of opposing cutouts at the same height.
Tip: use the widest bottle you have to make the templates.
You can see I sketched out traces of both ends of the bottles (inner circles) then I roughly sketched out the shapes I will cut out. (I used previously used paper in order to conserve.) I've also added about 3/16ths of an inch to the the trace. The bottle will still sit snuggly, but not pinched.
Afterthought: I discovered after cutting I made the neck slots a little too wide.
Now I will cut these out and trace them on to the sides of the box. Use a ruler or such to line up the center of the cutouts on the opposing sides. Since this the mock-up, I am just eyeballing it. You can also measure from the edge of the box equal distances on both sides and align the center of the cutouts to those markings. Aw, heck, I'll measure mine too. My box is about 12 inches wide so that will be the center of my center cut outs. Once that cut out is marked, I'll eye ball the left and right cutouts, centering them in the space.
Tip: you can find the center of the cutout by folding it in half.
I've taped the cutouts on the same side to check the depth. I can probably add a quarter inch to the depth of the cutouts you can also see that we'll get about three bottles in this wine rack. Alternating the direction of the bottles and squeezing them together you might be able to rack 4 bottles. For this mock-up I am just going to accommodate 3 bottles in the same direction.
Now I will trace the cut outs on both sides.
After the cut outs are traced, I cut them out with an Xacto knife.
Here is the wine rack with bottles in it.
Here is the wine rack with the flaps taped into position.
Tip: If you use boxes of the same size, you can stack these. Now you can stack them in a cabinet or closet. If your wine racks are out in the open, cover them with contact paper before cutting. Or, you can paint them. The cardboard soaks up paint, so be sure to use a primer.
