Wine Cooler 4 U Blog

CellarTracker Wine Cellar Management

Yesterday I wrote the draft of “Managing Your Wine Inventory – An Overview”.  Today I followed-up with a brief look at the one product that appears to stand out among everything available – CellarTracker, a web-based product.  You can judge the product for yourself at cellartracker.com/new. Be sure to enter the “/new” so that you are looking at the upgraded version of the product.

The purpose of this Post is to hi-lite the product.  In a 15 minute period, I perused the site, added a wine to my personal cellar with its location in my wine cooler and my own note about it. I also read the notes added by five others, who have the wine in their cellars, looked at the label image (where available) that was added for me and the ratings for the wine and more.

If you have wines that you are keeping, or you have or are evolving a large collection, I strongly recommend that you look at this product.  You can access most of its features at no cost.  Making a voluntary payment of your choice gets you access to everything.

If you have more than 50 or so bottles, you already know that keeping track of the contents of your wine cooler can be challenging.  This past weekend I decide to review the software available for inventorying my collection.
My long-time career has been in the computer industry, working in almost every aspect, beginning back in the days when a large computer (now out performed by my laptop) occupied a very large air conditioned room on a raised floor with thick cables connecting everything.  I still greatly appreciate and enjoy the changes that occur in the computer world every year.  Still, I was surprised at what I discovered.

There are many software packages on the market to help you with cellar management.  And, for those with spreadsheet and/or software development knowledge, you can do it yourself.  Historically, this software has been of the traditional sort – loaded on your computer and accessed from your computer, or perhaps from other computers on your home network. It appears that this approach to wine cellar management is coming to an end.

The future of wine cellar management is on the web, and I’m going to provide some overview information about the subject.  Future Posts will provide more detailed information.

The reasons that a web-based solution is going to succeed are:

• you can access your cellar info from anywhere, including your smart phone
• you can have access to the data that others contribute to the database of wines (There will be more on this subject in a future Post.)

There are several web-based products that seem to be worth investigating in detail.  They are:

• CellarTracker
• Vinfolio
• Bottlecount.com
• Vintrust

The product that appears to be leading the way is CellarTracker (cellartracker.com).  The cost? Nothing, unless you want access to the special features.  Even then, the amount you pay is voluntary. CellarTracker has the definitions for about 450,000 wines. As each new user joins the site, and contributes information about their wines (purchase price, uploading a wine-label image, or entering a public tasting note or drinking window), the site gets a little better for everyone else using the site. CellarTracker claims that when most people go to catalog their collection they find that 99 percent of their wine is already in the database, they just search based on a word or two from the label, click on the wine, and then enter as little or as much data as they would like to track.

Also see: baycountryliquors.com/softlink.htm for an extensive review of many cellar software packages.