No apologies for posting here instead of a CT forum as we all use it anyway !
Expensive bottles of burgundy are numbered. Many of us enter these bottles into CT and we record when they are consumed.
If CT had a bottle number attribute it would be easy for Eric to warn you that you were entering in a bottle someone else had entered or even drunk. You could even try this before purchasing the bottle !
In the interests of the community the owners of the bottles could be warned of the collision.
This would seem to be a “low tech/yet high tech” way of helping shut down fraud. It always worries me when we leave trophy empty bottles at restaurants.
Anthony.
I wish CT had ENOUGH critical mass to make such a solution work, but it depends upon such a large percentage of the wine collecting world to use it to have a good hit rate. An interesting idea though.
Interesting thought. Even if CT does not have enough critical mass, is it possible – might it still make sense (not only for fraud but for general information) – to include a field for Tasting Notes that allows the user to enter an AP number, or a label number (i.e. DRC)?
The proper field is the per-bottle note field which already exists.
This is a good idea, Anthony. It does require trusting that others are reading, writing, and then entering the bottle number correctly, however.
Perhaps in the “wiki” section for such a wine there could be a link to a webpage that has pictures of bottles showing their respective bottle number — that would eliminate the “wrong number” problem, but would be a bit more clumsy to use.
I think what eric meant by enough critical mass is that the wineries don’t usually number bottles in the first place so there’s nothing to enter and, if one does, it would require the vast majority of people owning that wine to be active CT users.
Rick’s latter point is what I was referring to. Only about about half of wine collectors even bother to inventory. About 25-30% of them appear to be on CT, at least with a heavy American bias). (Rough estimates based on the fact that about 15% of production of a number of recent Internet darling wines (SQN, Pavie, Quilceda etc.) end up on CT. You would need a lot more people using CT very religiously to get enough coverage of enough bottle serial numbers to have such a mechanism be useful. You would also need auction houses and resellers to actively collect and perhaps publicize this info to help you in advance of making a decision).