If you have 250 or more btls in your cellar, why are u not on CT?

If you have 250 or more btls in your cellar, why are u not on CT??? Or at least have a reliable spreadsheet of your own???

I organize a local monthly wine group dinner. And pretty much every month, the last few guys to post their wines for an event, are guys with cellars over 1000 btls but with no means to track what they own. And, these are really smart people. Most of them pretty technology savvy to boot. When asked in the past they expressed the perceived challenge of of; tally, organizing and loading their cellars on the front end. One guy expressed concern over needing to contribute the expected annual donation. He’s pretty tightfisted. These concerns are not without merit but after you’ve accumulated 250 btls +, keeping track of what you have so you can drink them within their window, becomes very difficult. Plus how do you avoid not completely forgetting to drink something before it starts to fall off? Especially once you have 500 plus blts? It becomes very difficult and time consuming to rummage though racks and boxes looking for something you think you still own but drank a couple years ago. Plus, you’re holding up my event thread :slight_smile:.

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Starting from a small cellar and constantly adding purchases is easy. Starting with a cellar of 500+ bottles and adding is extremely time consuming. Every ear I go through my cellar and do an inventory. I then go into CT and remove/add bottles as necessary. I’m not real good at keeping things up to date on a daily/weekly basis so my numbers skew dramatically. I’m just lazy that way. Went into it with the best of intentions but…

The guy too cheap to spend $25/yr for a service like CT is a headscrath just as is the people who post here day in and day out without becoming supporting members. It’s $25, the wine you are drinking is more expensive than that.

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Haha, I have quite a bit more than that and have no CT, chart, spreadsheet or rationale storage methodology. I was just grabbing more and more lockers. One day…

[cheers.gif] tBecause it’s fun to find bottles you dident
Think you had more of.It"d like a free bottle of Wine.

Wow. Serious question - how do you remember everything you own? Wouldn’t you have over the hill and forgotten stuff just due to memory lapse?

Separately, If u have excel you can bulk upload with Eric’s Help.

there is no better feeling than finding a few extra surprise dollars in your pocket


now imagine that, but with wine [cheers.gif]

I have always said that my two biggest competitors are (1) APATHY and (2) MICROSOFT EXCEL.

Craig, thanks for the plug. We are always here to help anyone who wants to get online. I have seen people bang out 1,000 bottles in a short afternoon if they have some friends to do a call and response and help them out.

My collection had to be started over following the 2004 hurricanes in FL, so the majority of my wines in storage are vintage 2005 to the present. More mature wines that I have backfilled are in more accessible places, like my wine fridges. Now if I had “cellars” like the big ballers - think Doc Glasser - I might pay someone to organize it.

250 bottles are pretty easy to keep track of, I mean it’s only 20 cases of wine. Even keeping mental track of 500, 700, 800 is probably easy enough to do. Probably around 1100+ is when it gets tricky.

Excel is transitional, IMHO. Anyone that’s serious about tracking that uses excel quickly realizes “there must be a better way”

That’s what led me to CT back in the day.

Ironic you were involved in the development of both…

Exactly. You can easily keep track of it at those levels, esp if you have a cellar. If they’re all in boxes, it’s different.

Moreover, some people don’t obsess about looking at and admiring their collections. If you have them in a cellar, it’s pretty easy to keep a mental picture of what you tend to put where.

What I can’t understand is the people who mark every slot for every bottle and track what they take out of where. I wonder if those folks keep track of the age of their underwear and socks.

Also - the perfect should not be the enemy of the good enough. I write shopping lists on a little sticky pad and put notes or dates to myself on the fridge if there’s something I’m supposed to do that I might forget. Some people live in their phones and store everything there. But that doesn’t mean it’s better to do so. If you’re comfortable with something and it works for you, unless there’s a compelling reason to change, why change? And remember that your idea of compelling may not be someone else’s.

I have a cellartracker account and use it (sort of) to track purchases and deliveries, but I think the answer to your question is “because it is a hobby.” I know for certain that I have the wines I have. I go down to the cellar to find something and poke around until I do. Sometimes I find things I have forgotten I had, which is a bonus. Rarely, I can’t find something I “know” is there, but it will turn up eventually.

If I cellared wines that have short drinking windows it might be a bigger issue, but nearly everything I own is going to be fine if I don’t get to it now. So . . . I don’t really care to “track” my cellar.

I should add that I am a huge fan of CT. The fact that I don’t use it as others do doesn’t diminish its value to me

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great minds think alike. It is a perpetual treasure hunt!!

As I’m not a dedicated scribe, Excel works fine for me, and I make it a point to keep current. Generally I organize by region and producer, so finding something isn’t too difficult.

I think the answer to your question is “because it is a hobby.”

Neal answered it more eloquently than I.

Anyone willing to cop to a spiral notebook?

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Because I’m too lazy to spend time keeping it up to date and I have a good memory and it keeps decent track of my cellar. This may be the shorter version of what Neal said.

I enjoy knowing where everything is, and the power of the TNs I can track over time, etc. All in, without CT, I wouldn’t enjoy the hobby as I do.

However, many folks I know enjoy the hobby just as much by experiencing the surprise of losing line of sight of certain wines, yet finding them later. They feed off and love the spontaneity of kind of knowing the wines are there, but not really knowing where they are. And, the organization and structure of using CT feels confining, suffocating and foreign to think of using it.

These people are known as Perceivers, or “P”, in the MBTI parlance. I LOVE my “P” friends. I’m going to a Champagne event today for my wife’s business partner, and he must own 400 bottles? He doesn’t know where anything is in his cellar, he enjoys opening whatever he grabs and he’s a gas to drink with but he’d never use CT. Another one of my “P” friends who is a joy.

I formerly used Excel. Back in 2012 I emailed the S/S to you guys and you uploaded it into CT. Made it as easy as falling off a log.
Love your invention, Eric. It gives you so much more than tracking. Tasting notes can tell you if a wine is ready or may need a long decant. Average price paid tells you if that unfamiliar wine offered at a deep discount is really a good deal compare to what most paid for it. Link to wine searcher helps you find that wine you newly fell in love with.

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No, but that would be an improvement over multiple legal pads.

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