I’m looking for suggestions on how to share access to my wine cellar with family while still keeping CellarTracker up to date.
Right now I have a cellar stocked with about 500 bottles (and growing). I have one clearly defined section set up that my wife and her parents know it is “safe” to pull from (all daily drinkers). Everything is entered into CellarTracker, with bin numbers attached to each record.
There are two specific cases that I’m looking for suggestions on:
1. How to track consumed bottles? My wife and in-laws are welcome to pull bottles and drink them, but what’s the best way to track what was drunk, so that I can update CellarTracker later? A log book in the cellar? Note cards? Send me a photo of the label? How have you handed this problem? What’s worked for you?
2. Read-only access to CellarTracker? My wife is more interested in wine than her parents, and she would like to have access to my CellarTracker account so that she can browse the collection and be able to pull a particular bottle. However she doesn’t really want to be able to change anything in CellarTracker (partly because she’s not interested in doing the wine bottle accounting, and partly out of fear that she’ll break something). I found articles in CellarTracker help docs about granting complete control, but that’s not what she wants. And my impression is that if I make her my “friend” on CellarTracker she could see my collection, but still won’t be able to see the bin each wine is in. Is there a way to just give her read-only access to my CellarTracker account?
Charles, as to 1), I tried to put in a similar system, in terms of a section my wife could freely grab from, with the request that she just send a screenshot of whatever she drank. That lasted for about a week.
She appreciated having guidance on what was ready to drink but couldn’t ever come around to consistently letting me know that she’d drunk them. Ultimately I found it was just more practical to reconcile that section every couple weeks as it only took a couple minutes. Perhaps your wife is more interested than mine in record keeping!
Physical log is the only thing that will work, i promise you. Stays next to the cellar, they pull a bottle out, it and the location have to be written down.
You can use the print a wine list feature and she can just keep notes on the paper. Use the restaurant style and check the “Show inventory bin” box, along with any other options you want.
That’s what I do with my nephews and nieces when they come over to house sit when we’re away. They do tend to drink everything in that safe section before I get back!
Thank you all for so many good ideas on tracking consumed bottles. I’ll talk over some of these ideas with my wife to see which she thinks would work best (since it is mainly her and her family that will have to implement the plan).
If I could redirect a bit, does anyone here allow CellarTracker “friends” to view their cellar data? If you do, can your “friend” see which bin a wine is in? If they can, this would work great for my wife (but not her family). I will probably have to play around with this feature to explore its capabilities, but I thought I’d ask here first.
I have a bin in the cellar that is open season. Sometimes there is good stuff in that bin. Stuff I’ve pulled but didn’t drink for whatever reason. Then we have some wines in a piece of furniture and there daily drinkers in there, too. And there is always something in our beverage fridge including a bottle of good Champagne for “emergencies “. I haven’t had any issues with tracking bottles or something getting pulled for many years. And, we have an understanding that she can drink whatever she wants whenever but I get to replace it if she does.
Yes I have friends I can see their cellar. You can filter by their location / bin, but I don’t see where you can just see the location or bin on the wine in the list. Maybe you can email Eric and he should respond pretty quickly.
My wife is at our house a fair amount when I’m not there, and occasionally our adult kids are as well. We have a couple of approaches. First there is a section for the kids which is stocked with various wines they like (we’re talking adults in their 30’s and 40’s). Anything that is in their section I’ve marked as consumed in CT. It’s fair game to drink and there is no need to CT it after consumption. They drink and recycle the bottles. It’s actually labeled as “kids bin”. I replenish it twice or so a year.
My wife’s section is bigger and has a bunch of wines she likes. If she and her friends drink something, she just rinses the bottle(s) and puts them somewhere out of the way for me to CT later. If I’m gone for a couple of weeks she occasionally will send a pic and tell me to CT them so she can get them out of the way. It’s easier than it may sound, and has worked for us since 2006 when I started on CT. They get my CT compulsiveness, and find dealing with it is a fair tradeoff for drinking good wine.
Agree with Andrew. Email the CT user helpline and they will find an easy way to do what you need to do, assuming it’s possible. Or they might have a satisfactory work around.
Neck tags. When the bottle is pulled, the neck tag goes in a small box in our cellar. Same method regardless of where it’s pulled from or by whom. I can update CT at my leisure using the pile of tags.
I have a section dedicated only for certain people. If they pull wine I will know which one just by seeing which is empty if they forget to take a pic of it.
Yep - this is how most of my bottles are labeled. Then it’s easy to leave the tag in a spot for me to scan. Spouse also leaves empties on counter for those with labels on bottle - which are the true daily drinkers. I don’t care that much on those anyway - if we run out of a case then I can just zero out the inventory
A little bit of an update on this part. I emailed CellarTracker support for some guidance, and got a prompt response. On Labor Day, no less. (Kudos to Eric for being so attentive to support requests.)
In our correspondence, Eric pointed out that it is possible for “friends” to see bin numbers, but only when viewing individual bottles. Unfortunately, the process to set up the required search options is a bit unwieldy, and more hoops than my wife wants to jump through. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to get the bin information in the (new) iOS app at all.
I ended up installing the iOS app on my wife’s phone and logging her into my account. We’ll see how that works out.
You could create a separate account for her with full read/write access (same as you’ve given her) - probably the better practice to keep things clean. (And perhaps Eric/team can confirm if she does something wrong easier to fix).
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