It’s an interesting question, but I agree these are some disadvantages - the coding hardware for RFID could be prohibitive.
The biggest downside is that the barcode labels contain more than just a barcode - wine name, purchase info, drinking window, , ratings, etc. That can be very useful to have right there (of course it’s also on CT). As you can see from my picture, I apply labels to bottle hang tags so I can see what each bottle is without even removing it from the shelf.
Agreed. There would have to be a significant reduction in hardware costs for consumer level RFID to begin to be practical. As with all tech, the early adopters bear the brunt of startup costs.
If the wineries were to adopt RFID in their labels, and include a unique bottle serial number in the stored data (which could include Winery, wine, vintage, etc. - lot’s of potential there) then the consumer adoption becomes more palatable. I have seen basic readers that attach to a smart phone starting in the $200 range - about the same as a good barcode scanner. This approach would enable CT and other sites to add RFID support much as they have done for barcodes. Relatively speaking (make no mistake - it would still be a big effort to do) bolting on RFID functionality to existing applications. The standards are pretty well established so there is no need to start wholly from scratch. Adding a wine could mean reading the RFID tag which would contain all the wine details as noted above. Once found, should the user wish to add the bottle to his or her cellar details such as purchase date, cost, store, etc. could be entered as usual, and the RFID serial number could serve as the bottle number or a concurrent value to bottle number. Scanning multiple bottles at once could be done in a similar manner as bulk update barcode scans are done today.
That all being said, RFID will still never wholly replace readable labels. There will always be a need for old fashioned human eye readable labels.
You can get printable RFID labels, so you can have both barcode/QR and RFID on the same label, with about the same size (30336 that is used today)
My labels are custom and for the most part do not show any information except a QR code and a INT2of5 code for each bottle. I couldn’t care less about ratings, in general, and I don’t want other info on the label…The problem comes down to a single inventory number per bottle.
There are at least 3 freq ranges for RFID - you just have to pair the right freq. with the right reader and you can manage the range with your application…I’d probably put the reader in the doorway and have it automatically move the wines to a new cellar location - outside of cellar - when bottles pass through a 3-4’ range window.
With all of that said, I’m still not sure who makes the best RFID printer, tags, and reader for this application. I’m still looking into it. I suspect CT would have to add some level of support for such a thing.
Since phones are starting to get NFC, that is another vector to look at.
-mark
It’s once again time for me to consider using the barcode/scan features in CellarTracker. I’m sure my situation is not unique. I have most of my bottles entered into CT, but have not been consistent in deleting the consumed bottles, so I’m in need of reconciling what wine I have and what I don’t. Additionally, I have several dozen cases pending delivery; most of these have already been entered as pending in CT.
Maybe some kind wise soul can answer these questions:
Thanks for any instructions or suggestions.
Warren
Print out the labels. To start best to bulk relocate every bottle in CT to a new location called MISSING in one shot. Except maybe pending…
Then physically go through every bottle in the cellar and relocate to the current location from MISSING and attach the barcode label.
You can use the ios CT app which has a barcode reader capability embedded so you just have scan the labels to relocate.
Then you’re done and everything remaining in location MISSING is toast, just bulk consume them as “missing presumed drunk” and toss the accompanying label.
Everything is clean and tidy.
Bulk printing the labels was basically what I did for my first barcode inventory. More specifically, I printed labels for everytihng in CT and went through my cellar box-by-box. I first applied a “bin” label to each box (you can see a picture of my bin labels earlier in this thread), and scanned that bin. Then I went through the bottles in the box, applying their labels and immediately scanning them. So I had a record of each bin and what was in it. If I found something that I didn’t have a label for, I wrote it down and printed a label for it later (this was all at my offsite, so I didn’t have my label printer there to do it immediately). At the end, I had a list of previously unaccounted for bottles, and I had a list of missing bottles (from the unused labels). I was scanning into a spreadsheet rather than directly into CT, because I wasn’t aware of an easy way to do a bulk “scan bin; scan all bottles in bin” work flow. It’s possible you can do that and I just don’t know how. I just went home and manually reconciled the spreadsheet into CT at the end of the day.
These days, all of my deliveries go to my offsite storage. On days when I’m going down there to receive them, I print out the labels for everything I’ve received before I head over. I temporarily put them in a “TEMP-RECV” bin in CT, and when when I stow them in my storage, I record the actual bin they went into. This makes it relatively easy for me to see if I accidentally missed something (nothing should be in “TEMP-RECV” at the end of the day).
I use a Motorola CS3070 scanner which works well. I think I tried it on my iPad once and it worked fine. I haven’t tried it on my iPhone, but it should work. I generally use a laptop for this, so I don’t have a ton of experience with it on iOS, but it looks like a BT keyboard to the device, so it shouldn’t be a big deal. It does need to be charged, so if you’re going to leave it in the cellar permanently, you’d probably want a place to plug it in.
Upon further reflection, I should amend this. It’s been a number of years since I went through this process so not all of the details are still clear. But you could use the bulk scan/relocate feature in CT to do a workflow similar to this. IIRC, the biggest reason I didn’t do that at the time was that the internet connectivity (both wifi and cellular) at my offsite was iffy, so I wasn’t confident I’d be able to load CT reliably. Also, even now when I’m doing a ton of inventory, I find it faster to scan into a local file and reconcile later rather than having to interact with a web interface and wait for pages to load. CT is pretty efficient, but if I’m in a hurry to get home from the offsite, scanning (with a laser barcode scanner, not my phone) into a spreadsheet is hard to beat.
Anyway, as long as you have good internet in your cellar, you can probably save steps by scanning directly into CT rather than using my method.
Documentation is for quitters.
Just read through this and other barcode threads, thank you for the info.
Question: Once the barcodes are set up, can I use the same details to print wine TAGS to put on the front of the bottles? I like having the bottles tagged so I see what’s where.
Funny to look back on this thread. We didn’t end up barcoding when we brought all the bottles in-house. We ended up crazy rushed for time because the cellar was the only temperature controlled part of the still-unfinished house, and a heat wave was coming. All the wine would fit in the cellar, but it wouldn’t fit in there in boxes, which is, of course, how it was delivered to the house. So the process of getting everything from spread all over the basement and first floor into the cellar was a round-the-clock nightmare, and throwing the barcode process on top of that was more than we wanted to contemplate. We did a full reconciliation against CT as we loaded in, though, and I believe we got very close to 100% accuracy at that point.
Over the years since then, I’ve considered it a few times, and could never get there. It would be a big task, and, while it might gain us a slightly higher level of accuracy with inventory on an ongoing basis, I’m pretty sure things are tracked with acceptable accuracy as it is. I also like the process of recording each morning, along with a brief note, what we drank the night before. I realize I can still do this with barcodes, I just mean I don’t need the barcodes to save me that time - I like doing it.
The biggest plus for us would have been knowing which bottles were which when they came from multiple sources. But we realized that we unfortunately didn’t really know which were which on the bottles we already had (bulk of the cellar), meaning we wouldn’t have been able to barcode them accurately as to source. So that bonus would only apply to purchases made since 2016.
I still think it would be really cool, it just doesn’t make sense for our particular circumstances.
As somone who is about to move everything in house, this is a very useful thread – and Eric’s support link is even more helpful. I hope to resist what happened to Sarah and follow through with this. 
One quick question – is there a bar code printer that you would recommend (or ones to strongly avoid)? There is a dymo printer on Amazon that I came across with mostly positive reviews: Dymo labelwriter 450. It is about $75, which is fine, but if there is a better one that is cheaper (or if this one is trouble), it would be nice to know!
Fully agree! Love the barcode function for exactly the same reasons Bob mentions here. Can’t imagine living without it. An additional benefit: re-organization. I did not need to reshuffle a major amount of bottles yet in my cellar, but with the barcodes it will be super easy as well to re-organize a cellar.
I started bar coding and printed labels for about 100 bottles on Avery labels. I pasted them on the bottles. Within a week, at least 10 of the labels had fallen off. I decided it was not worth the trouble.
Weird! i’ve never had a label fall off unless the bottle was wet when i put the label on.
This is the one i own, and have had it for 7 years. nothing fancy, but it works!
I have the same printer (450) and have printed thousands of labels over the years. It’s definitely a bit of a time-suck up-front, but if you put your bottles into racking and each space has a unique code/label that you associate with each specific bottle, then it’s not much additional work to print/stick labels on the bottles before putting them in the slots. And it’s really slick pulling a bottle out and using the iPhone app to scan the label. I’ve had maybe half a dozen inventory errors in the last decade, mainly because of the bar codes. The only time it really happens now is when I’m traveling, my wife tells me she pulled a bottle, and I don’t immediately take it out of inventory (although she’s also gotten very good at helping me with my shortcoming by keeping the bottles until I return home so i can scan then if I didn’t pull them out already).
But that’s just me
Thanks Mark and Mark! It is now on my wishlist.
Does anybody use Cellartracker bar coding to print the front bottle tag also (like in my avatar pic to the left), so you can see what bottle it is without taking it out? If so, how do you set this up? Do you do the individual bottle barcodes AND the front tag? Or one or the other?
Happy to come help setup / visit new home / alleviate storage concerns 