CellarTracker!

HERE'S SOMETHING TO GO SEE: CellarTracker! -- an online wine cellar management program. There are several such services out there, but I've been using CT for around six months now and it's by far the best in its power and flexibility. What's more, because it's on the web an not your PC, you're able to access your list of wines from any computer with an Internet connection or web-enabled phone (very handy when you're at the wine shop wondering how to best surprise your wife with your lack of self control).

One of the great things about CT is that it's a community-based model. Unless you mark your holdings as private, you're able to see other users' cellars, and they yours. This is very useful: Say you find a wine you like and enter it into your database. CT then shows you all the other users who also hold that wine; browse their holdings for a while, read their tasting notes, and you can very quickly find other wines you're likely to enjoy trying. The community model also makes data entry VERY easy: Every wine entered by every user (and there are 12,000 users and 2 million bottles in the system) is in the shared database; for most wines, entry involves typing in the UPC code, and the software automatically pulls the rest of the information -- maker, vintage, appellation, year ... all of it.

Lots of other features (pasted from the CT home page, and you can click the picture above to see a full-sized version of my CT home page):

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)
• NEW! Automatic valuation of your cellar (read more)
• NEW! 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 report features are especially useful. You're able to add and consume bottles with a click, so rather than poking through your inventory to find what you still have and what's worth drinking, you can go to CT, run a drinkability report for, say, reds, and instantly see what's ready to pull. It's really very slick. And while it's free, donations are encouraged, and franlky, deserved: I made a donation within several hours of finding CT, and use it to manage all the bottles in our modest collection. Check it out.

Update: While pulling the Technorati tag code for this post I found this interview with CT founder Eric LeVine. I was impressed with his bio when I found CT. Short story: In software early; Lotus, then Microsoft; fateful trip to Italy where he discovers a passion for wine; writes a software program to manage his cellar; makes it web based and collaborative so his friends can use it; retires young and makes CT his full-time job; rides into the sunset. Great story and an interesting guy.

Tags: cellartracker, eric levine