I am confused here : The per bottle notes show up in your cellar listing/searches with the bottles and can be searched with advanced search. This utility is limited on the app, tbf, and will be more accessible with the new app. Can you be more specific about a use case where we are coming up short so I can address this with engineering?
There is a trade-off on what is off interest to “some of us.” While I too like having detailed information, it ends up micro-fractioning the data and making it useless to nearly everyone. eg look our our Krug MV data where there are so many variants that we can’t control that any aggregate data is lost. Ideally, we have some format where there is a 10000m view of wine data like Krug MV which shows all TNs but then can be dialed into tiny specifics that might be relevant to only a single user.
Currently, it is really the best thing to include disgorgement or base vintage data (Champagne, we are talking here) in a TN. That is pretty much the only use case where another user will find that data relevant.
More robust capabilities to search and group would be helpful, no doubt. But, first of all, the bottle note is only visible to me which means I can’t group based on what others have entered. As one example this means that for a NV wine, I’m not able to group based on different disgorgements or bottlings no matter where everyone enters it. This messes up drinking windows, among other things. Also, I would love to be able to group by importer, though maybe that’s just me, in which case enhanced search on bottle notes would be good enough. Although if you’re using bottle note for more than one thing, that could still be problematic.
The ideal solution, for me, would be a system wide field at the bottle level for bottling date/lot as a sub value for NV, or maybe even vintage wines. Similarly, I would love a system wide field at the bottle level for importer. I realize this could get complicated, but I’m hoping there’s some better way to address this than dumping everything into an unformatted text field, even if there will be improved search and grouping capabilities for that field.
Ideal in theory but people can’t enter their bottles in the right place now, so how do you expect them to organize them by importer or bottling date? A few people would use it correctly and the rest would be confused and stick stuff wherever. The data would be completely unreliable.
Agree some sort of solution like this would be best, with a definition of what the date references - because it’s not vintage for NV/MV wines. The “vintage” date for NV wines seems to be used differently by different users.
Got it. There are a couple of different approaches here and I will pass on the suggestions to the engineering side. Adding new fields is really a non-starter and would likely create more problems than it solves.
I can better use of hashtags as a solution. And we are working on ideas for the drinking window issue for NV wines.
Thanks for the detailed comments. We do take these into consideration even if we can’t achieve everything.
I’m confused. System-wide field means that there is only a single value for a certain wine that is shared by all users. How on earth would you make this work? One wine can have multiple importers just in one market, but CT caters to all markets around the world. What use it would be to me if I saw a wine being imported by K&L if I live in Finland? Or vice versa. And importers can even change for one wine mid-vintage.
Thanks for chiming in Andrew. I have often been confused by seeing vintage dates for champagnes were I know for a fact that the producer does not create that wine as vintage dated. Now I know where they’re coming from. I’m glad you’re cleaning that up.
I have listed disgorgement dates in the bottle notes when I get the dates from the producer. There are many producers that don’t put the date on any labels but will provide it to you if you give them the code on the capsule or bottle. I don’t put those in the tasting notes because I feel it would confuse people because it’s not outwardly apparent anyone else.
If the disgorgement date is explicit on the bottle, I put that in a TN.
Oh, gotcha. That kind of approach would make sense. With system-wide field I couldn’t help but think of a field that would be common to all wines, not individual bottles.
But when it comes to system-wide bottle fields, I think it would be possible to have separate fields for base vintages, bottling dates, disgorgement dates. These fields could be left blank and, say, a NV wine with different entries for multiple disgorgements would show all the notes & bottles under the label, but it would be possible to filter out just eg. certain disgorgement dates for this given wine by for example clicking that certain disgorgement date link. That way one could add bottles / notes for just a single NV wine if they didn’t know any furthet details of the wine, but if they knew, they could add optional details for more accurate filtering parameters.
Don’t know how the CT guys are planning to implement the feature and at which point it is at the moment, but would love to hear ant details, if they are willing to share!
Honestly, it is purely in the speculative phase right now. There are other priorities like a modernized app that is functionally equivalent to what the desktop does. I am listening to all of this, doing the best I can to guide anyone how to use what is there and just conceptualizing what we might be able to do down the road.
I also just noticed this change when I saw the Ulysse Collin wines are now grouped together.
First, I recognize that Vintage is entirely different from base year or disgorgement. However, I also contend that it only makes sense to group wines together if they are meant to deliver a consistent taste and experience with each release, e.g. Roederer Brut Premier or Graham’s 10 Year Tawny.
Merging all of the distinct Maillons iterations into a singular wine severely degrades the usefulness of CellarTracker’s underlying data like drinking windows, valuation (6 different auction prices), and community reviews - which now has 623 reviews and many of these are without disgorgement / base info.
I feel the UC wines should be treated like how the Krug GC or L-P Grand Siècle or Roederer Collection wines are and differentiated by their iteration or base vintage. CellarTracker already does this for the aforementioned wines in the Designation field in a wine’s definition.
I stopped posting here, except in travel, a number of months ago but came here to say this is a huge problem and pain that the Ulysse Collin wines have been consolidated without any warning.
All my purchases are now grouped together and I have no way of knowing which price went with which base vintage, or which bottle I drank went with which base vintage. I can dig through receipts to find purchase info, and I can re-inventory everything in the cellar, but there’s no way at all I can track which bottle drunk or which tasting note goes with which base vintage. I have dozens of notes. I would have put more information in the notes or purchase info if I had any idea that the vintage designation (and yes, these are NV, but they are also 100% single vintage) would suddenly disappear.
It’s not just my personal notes either. As the post above says, all the notes in the database are now mostly useless as well because they started out life associated with a base vintage, so people didn’t think they needed to record that.
@Eric_LeVine and @Andrew_Hall - is there anything that can be done here? Any way to restore? This hardly seem fair to destroy all our records in order to adhere to this principle which only sort of applies.
We can pull a spreadsheet of your data and help you reconcile.
PS - According to our best information, the Les Maillons hasn’t been single vintage generally since the mid 00s and some are heavily reserve wines.
PPS - ditto the Perrieres, if we believe Antonio : " In this release, the Les Pierrières is 40% 2015 and 60% 2014 [if it is based 2015 why is there more 2014 %] "
I stand corrected then, about base vintages and apologize for that.
It is still my personal opinion, though, that this is not a case like NVs that are far more generic, disgorgement after disgorgement.
I’m in the same situation; when you say “reconcile”, what do you mean, exactly? If this isn’t fixed, this makes CellarTracker somewhat unusable for me. I’m genuinely baffled you made this decision without considering the effects; the 2018 Maillons and the 2010 Maillons are wildly different wines, and grouping them together makes absolutely no sense.
EDIT: I see you’re treating Krug differently; I see no reason you couldn’t have converted the Collin into “2018 disgorgement” given the situation here. I very much don’t want all Krug MV consolidated into a single entry either - a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Reconcile as in be able to match the bottles with “vintage” and add a per bottle note.
Our policy has always been that this informstion is best as a per bottle note. Krug got too far out of hand before we noticed and it became too hard to fix.
Andrew, I’ve been adding Collin to my cellar for very many years, this is quite a late policy change for what could have been very easily avoided. You’re being consistent to the detriment of your customers who actually care about these wines. Do you think the tasting notes on the Maillons are helpful to anyone now that you’ve consolidated them across all vintages? Why not just treat it the same as Krug - who does this help, exactly?
With respect to your response, is your proposed remedy (i) that after you send me a spreadsheet I then fix what you’ve broken after so many years, and (ii) I do the same for every grower Champagne I own to avoid this issue happening again once someone discovers Brochet added 3% of reserve wines to his Haut Meuniers?