While I remain a non-fan of uncurated crowd sourced data for food and wine evaluation/ratings, CellarTracker is the gold standard of wine inventory management for consumer collectors. I’ve looked a a few other platforms including Wine Owners, the platform Vino Vault now uses for inventory control. Wine Owners does some things I don’t want and nothing that I do want. I’ve informed the powers that be at Vino Vault that they can use whatever they want internally, but they must commit to updating and reconciling with CellarTracker or I will take my wine elsewhere.
And for those wedded to Excel, bulk upload to CellarTracker is a breeze and CellarTracker is very helpful in this regard (or was 10 years ago when I moved my collection to CellarTracker).
I have about 2000 bottles in an offsite storage facility. I would not know how to begin to organize whats in the four lockers. I am too old to take out all of the wine from the boxes their in and organize them. I am stuck with my own list of what I have in what location. No too great a system but it works 90 percent of the time.
I’ve got a little over 2,000 bottles and my problem is that I’ve got a custom database with 15+ years of my personal notes as well as reviews from WS, RP. VM, and WE. I keep thinking about moving to CT as I like the interface and integration with VM, but am scared off by the migration process. I think it’s do-able, but it would be a lot of time and I’ve gotten used to my own customized system.
Why would I want to be? We have about 650 and everything is kept in Excel. I rarely if ever find an inventoried bottle. I looked into it and didn’t think it was worth the time. I don’t keep TNs but if i like something i put a brief note next to the bottle.
Interesting thread. I was not a wine hoarder, err, didn’t have a true wine cellar, until ~2008-2009, I created a spreadsheet when my pile of bottles got to be around 300, then found CT when I thought about there must be a “better way”. I signed up in late 2009 with an easy excel file transfer and haven’t looked back. My expectation was a simple in and out of what I had on hand and I still use it for that purpose, but also many of the other tools, tasting notes, drinking windows, forums (yes CT has it’s own chat forum, smaller group than here, but also help and data clean-up forums), integrated reviews from pros, wine searcher link… Really lots of useful stuff for wine geeks beyond “tracking”. Eric has seemed to always have an excellent handle on the technology and also tolerant of luddites like me who just want the simple “classic” version of things. I consider it one of the best values in wine; “free” if you can tolerate the ads, or a voluntary annual donation that pales in comparison to the time saved and information gained. I surely understand and agree with “it’s just a hobby” but for me the hobby is greatly enhanced by CT.
Because I used to have an accurate inventory on CellarTracker, then for various reasons “fell off the wagon” and stopped keeping it up to date. I have a cellar of unmanageable size and what I have listed in CellarTracker bears very little resemblance to my actual inventory. I am currently working towards enough organization that I can end up with an accurate inventory. it is a PROJECT.
I started coming up with a list of all the benefits I get from CT that a spreadsheet wouldn’t offer and stopped around the dozen or so mark. The fact that I’m too lazy to post all the differences is a perfect example of why I much prefer the power and ease-of-use (though it could still be improved) of CT.
I suppose that if you have very little interest in what the rest of the world thinks about the wines that you have in your cellar or that you’re interested in acquiring, then CT is of little use to you.
Being fastidious in keeping CT updated is important. There is a snowball effect that can occur (in your case it sounds like it has occurred). The same happened to me about 3 years ago right before we built our new cellar. Since then I have found a few easy things help hedge against the snowball:
Have an “overflow” rack (that’s what we call it) that holds near term drinkers both from your cellar and purchases. This lets me pull bottles for daily drinkers without worrying about CT. I just wipe all the previous bottles from the “OF” when I refill it and move another tranche forward. These are all bottles I don’t care to write notes on.
Once a year do a cursory inventory. I print the CT inventory and check that all rack spaces with bottles have bottles. Anything that is still in CT but an empty slot I remove. I don’t ever put bottles away without entering into CT so the converse doesn’t happen.
Those two things have cleaned up 99% of my issues.
Yeah I thought I did a good job keeping CT up to date, but I found out that I frequently drink bottles without removing them. I figured it out when I went to load 2 new bottles into an empty slot and saw that CT already had 5 bottles in that slot (that only holds 2 bottles). So that caused me to do a full inventory of all my slots and there were dozens of them that were way out of date. Probably going to have to do that every few months or I’m trying to get better at scanning them out when I pull them out rather than waiting until after I finish the bottle.
My tolerance/need for a physical audit is about once every 2 years. Much longer than that and I am “missing, presumed drunk”. But ANY system, whether CT or Excel or whatever, requires maintenance (daily or whenever it changes is best) if you want it to be accurate. I’ve always been able to do my physical audit with minimum pain using lists printed and sorted in CT the same way my physical cellar is organized. I rack my wines by variety and not much else, so there is always some hunting and pecking. Mine inventory has fluctuated between 700-1500 bottles over the decade, currently at ~900 which is only slightly over my physical capacity of the actual cellar.
CT seems great. I occasionally leave notes, and often see what others are saying about a particular wine, but as of now I use my own excel sheet to manage my wines which is a rather significant amount. Doing it on my own excel file requires a bit more manual work, but I keep lots of other records, like wines planned for special occasions and when those are, projected next drink date, how many more bottles I expect to need for consumption in any given year. I monitor things like how long from vintage do bottles of a given price range and from a specific region or sub-region age on average, or certain varietals. A balance sheet. Inventory snapshots month to month, by size, color, type, country, region, sub region, price… A series of buy lists. Graphs on consumption and purchases.
As CT updates I keep considering switching over, but have yet to pull the trigger.
I use cellartracker almost daily. One huge plus of cellartracker is listing current auction value. Yeah you know that bottle of D’Auvenay Bonnes Mares you paid $660.00 for in 2016 is now selling for $6,847.50. Can your excel page do that?
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