I’ve chosen to organize some of my technically-NV champagnes with vintage years, as I know several others have as well. But I just looked at one of my wines (Emmanuel Brochet’s Le Mont Benoit)… and suddenly the vintages have disappeared! 
It seems the bottles I’d assigned vintages to have reverted to NV, and when I went to try to add a new bottle to my cellar, only NV was available.
Anyone else notice this? If it’s a mandatory, system-wide change it seems pretty major!
I applaud it. Those wines ARE non-vintage.
Put the base year in bottle notes.
If that’s your preference, great! And if CT decides that this is their new policy about NV Champagne, then fine. But I didn’t enter the year in the bottle notes when I bought the wines, and obviously I didn’t opt into this change.
FWIW this hasn’t (yet?) impacted the other NV bottles in my cellar. But my backup CSV file from just a few days ago shows the vintages…
from a data perspective, this is a pretty interesting move. can’t think of a reason why vintage field should be relevant (ideally, separate user-defined fields from global fields). and the “add new vintage” function still works so you can still add vintages to Brochet Le Mont, for example. Though maybe that goes away with more time?
Some of my Bouchard and Suenen NVs still have the associated vintage in the name, so if it is system wide, it hasn’t his these producers yet. Seems possible some other user went in and made the change. For instance, this is what comes up when I went to edit the ‘Wine Definition’ for a bottle of Bouchard, and clearly there’s an option to make it NV.
I report mis-entered NV Champagnes and the CellarTracker team corrects them.
I put the base vintage and disgorgement info in the bottle notes. Never once thought to enter them as vintage wines. Goes all the way back to 2004 that way.
This. Vintage means vintage, not “base vintage for an NV”.
The only exception to this rule is when a producer makes a NV Champagne that is always a single-vintage but not aged for 36 months to be eligible for the Vintage designation, yet has its vintage shown in the lot number (ie. R16 or something along those lines). In these cases I’ll add the wine as a vintage Champagne even if it is “officially” NV.
But if there are two or more vintages in the blend, NV it is. No two ways about it.
The Cedric Bouchard wines are the ones where I have done vintage entries for exactly the reason that they are stealth vintage wines.
The ideal solution is to have a way to record a lot or disgorgement year in a CT field that means just that for non-vintage (sometimes only technically non-vintage) wines, and then have an option to ignore or not ignore it in groupings. In some wines I own that is something I and others care about. Fortunately they are not champagnes so they’re left alone by the vintage police.
It isn’t system-wide, though it is our strong preference except in cases like Bouchard where they were truly single vintage wines, but not legally able to be called Vintage Champagne.
If something got changed, it was because it was a noted problem and causing confusion such as with proper vintage wines from the same producer. Base year or the vintage was being used as release year or disgorgement year, so even more confusing. Someone entering a 2023 or 2024 vintage champagne is going to get noticed in <24hrs and the whole chain will likely get smashed if it is a NV.
I apologize for the inconvenience, but as noted above these wines are not vintage wines. A per bottle note is the best way to denote the specifics.
Thanks for the official response Andrew.
FWIW, the R18 Le Mont Benoit is 100% from 2018 (according to William Kelley).
I know. I was not sure if spinning that off will cause the recurrence of issues or not. I have it in my pending box to think about. It also says thing on the label, though it is still not a vintage Champagne.
This wine doesn’t exist anymore, btw - is just labelled Premier Cru. Learning that is what started the process.
We’d like to have a better way to handle everyone’s preferences here, but that is down the road.
Just curious, do you put that in the bottle notes when you buy / enter the wines into CT? I often mention the disgorgement date in my tasting notes (when I can see the bottle), but I never used any other notes field…
Yup.
One of the reasons I don t use CT for my inventory - no complete control over everything.
What control do you seek that you don’t have?
The problem with bottle notes is the limited ability to do any searching or filtering on the information. I use them to record the importer and it’s a similar issue there. I’m hopeful that future versions of CT will be more transparent in recording information that is bottle specific but of general interest to at least some of us.
