I’ve recently started spending a lot more time buying, sorting and researching wine. This is partly in preparation for the ‘party season’ but also I’ve caught ‘the bug’; I’ve been to a number of wine tastings recently (Virgin Wines, Bibendum, The Wine Show) and have ended up buying various mixed cases of my favourites.
I’ve reached the point where I have circa 120 bottles; some for drinking now, some to be kept for special occasions and about 20 which could do with about 2-6 years of cellaring. My physical organisation and storage of these wines is fairly haphazard, the wines for laying down sit in a wine rack in a cool room in the flat, whites for immediate drinking are in the fridge, bottles sealed with a cork are in various cool cupboards in makeshift racks, while the rest are still in their cases until I find more rack space.
Dealing with 10-15 bottles at any one time was fairly straightforward and I had been using Corkd, a great little Web 2.0 site (now owned by Gary Vaynerchuk, the wine/vlogging fanatic) that allowed me to write brief reviews, keep a track of what I paid for them and so on…but it’s shortcomings were quickly exposed once I reached 40-50 bottles. So the hunt began for a new solution…
There are many new sites promising to bring Web 2.0 to the wine world, LogABottle, Winelog.Net and OpenBottles to name just a few. However, I wasn’t looking for fancy graphics, smooth contours and tagging this time, just:
Having read a number of reviews of other cellar management sites & services, I decided on CellarTracker. In terms of pure functionality, CellarTracker is head and shoulders above the other online offerings with an extremely large and active community.
The site is designed and run by one man, an ex-Microsoft programmer with a love of wine by the handy name of Eric LeVine
.
Here is a full list of features, taken from the site:
Cellar Inventory Management
* Report and search by producer, vintage, varietal, drinkability, etc.
* Purchase price and valuation data (locale settable)
* Consumption history
* Barcode support
* Restaurant-quality printed wine lists
* Per-bottle location & bin tracking
* Personal tasting notes
* Uploadable label images
* Wish lists and shopping lists
* Track pending deliveries (a.k.a futures)
* Premium feature: Automatic valuation of your cellar (read more)
* Express import tools for existing spreadsheets (read more)
Tasting Notes
* Record your own notes
* Group a series of notes into tasting events
* Read community tasting notes
* See what others say about wine in your cellar
* Automated integration with Stephen Tanzer’s IWC (for co-subscribers)
* Store other professional reviews and scores (in compliance with copyright)
* Community bulletin board
The import process was relatively smooth and involved sending a formatted spreadsheet to Eric who imported it and prompted me to map each wine to either an existing database entry or create a new wine. From then on, I’ve diligently added each purchase, ‘accepted delivery’ when the case has arrived and have started to record proper (but still rather amateur) tasting notes.
There’s a great Getting Started page on the CellarTracker wiki if you’re interested, plus I am able to expose the data on my wine cellar to the web via RSS and have added two pages to this site, my Wine Cellar (using the WP plugin Winex which is a little temperamental on my installation) and my Tasting Notes.
Finally, to view my cellar on the CellarTracker site, click here!
Thanks for the great writeup and so glad you are enjoying CellarTracker!
Greg,
I have over 1000 bottles tracked on CellarTracker and indeed find it a useful resource, useful enough that I donate to Eric for its use. Thanks for commenting on my blog
Hi Greg. Thanks for checking out OpenBottles. Our cellar feature is designed to be easy-to-use and maintain for people with smaller wine collections. Sorry it was not a good fit. However, because we're a wine social network, we have lots of other features that you might like, including the community reviews, corkboard, groups and our new lists features. I hope that you find these useful and fun.
The lists feature is indeed useful, I'll have more of an explore of OpenBottles at some point!
Very helpful review Greg – thanks! I'm now exploring CellarTracker and the iphone tie-in Cor.kz Wine Info