Maybe I missed this in someone else’s reply, but one thing I like about CT is the app. Sure, it’s not great, but it does basic, useful things. I can pull out my phone on the way home and decide what I’m drinking. (I need an app that tells me what my wife is making for dinner, so I don’t bug her all the time, or I need to start doing the cooking more.) And I can “consume” the bottle without firing up my laptop, add new wine when I order it while at work or by phone, or even in a shop. I can also review my notes and others when considering a wine to purchase. My cellar is “only” 400 or so bottles (I don’t enter all my dailies–do I really need to know that I bought some Cote du Rhone and drank it in a week? Mabye.) But I think the comparative advantage of CT over spreadsheets grows as you increase your inventory.
If you are loathe to re-enter your inventory that is currently on an Excel spreadsheet, you can do a bulk entry–yes, there is such a function. I have no stake in CT, just saying.
And, yes, it’s time to inventory–I’ve been moving stuff around for the last year as the OP knows, adding onto my house. Time to frame the cellar and get everything on racks–which is a good time to whittle down the inaccuracies.
I have a bunch of wines (for example, older German BAs and TBAs) with no value, probably because they really aren’t commercially available and don’t really appear in auctions. Examples of wines showing zero value are 1999 Marc Colin Volnay Caillerets, 2007 Stony Hill Cabernet, 2005 Buisson-Charles Volnay Santenots, 2007 Domaine Stephane Magnien Clos St. Denis, 1992 Willi Schaefer Graacher Domprobst Riesling Auslese and 1993 Joh. Jos. Prüm Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling Auslese.
Then, I have some smaller production wines where there are huge variations in value from year to year unrelated to vintage or vineyard quality - my guess is that they don’t appear that much on the auction market and so the data is different (higher) for ones that have appeared in the auction market recently from ones that have not. An extreme example of the kind of issue I see is that a 2002 Truchot Chambolle Musigny Sentiers is valued about $100 higher than a 2002 Truchot GC Combottes. Generally, his Combottes is worth a lot more than his Sentiers.
Inventory has become such a chore…I have racking for about 90 cases and need to replenish every couple of years. As I get older, with over 5000 bottles is cases, restocking the racks and inventorying the wine has become a real PITA… I know, poor me, but it’s really a PITA…
I don’t know…taking the 5-10 seconds to jot done any bottle I take from my cellar and sticking to it has saved me countless miserable hours re-inventorying my cellar time and time again over the years. It just makes sense to me.
Absolutely, Without camera features of the app I would not use 1/2 as much. I amazed at how quickly in finds obscure labels an check on wines while shopping. Certainly worthy of a donation IMO.
I am still in the stage of inventorying daily drinkers so I know what I drink and what I actually like. Relatively new to the whole wine thing so reviewing my notes is helpful in deciding what direction to taste in next… Thanks to Beserkers I have recently acquired some Vincent Pinot and a few cases of Baudry and a bunch of other Cab Francs.
My problem with inventory is not the initial cataloging when the wine comes in, but tracking what goes out (as others have also mentioned). Inevitably, 2-3 weeks will go by before I realize that I haven’t written down any of the btls that have been consumed. Seems so easy, but yet time and time again it happens.
Ah, but the pain of a full inventory (of course proportional in severity to the size of the cellar) has kept me on the straight and narrow now for many years. It just took a couple of inventories to do it, as they were an enormous hassle… And that sheet of paper on the counter stares at me as I grab a bottle and demands but a few seconds of my time.
But, yeah . . . especially if you pull a lot of bottles for a party. Or your spouse does and the bottle may go from cellar to recycling within a few minutes.
Despite using CT, I’m certainly not diligent enough in recording the comings and goings. But, this just means I have more fun doing reconciliation and finding “new” bottles.
I use a Google spreadsheet to track my inventory. I can access this spreadsheet from my smartphone, so I can easily view my list when trying to pick out a bottle for dinner. I created a separate tab for tasting notes / drink log, and simply cut/paste when the bottle moves from inventory to my dinner table.
If I wanted to, I could create a pivot table to mimic the data analytics that I’ve heard you guys mention in the CT app. Perhaps one day.
I have a section of the cellar where I keep wines that my wife can pull at whim. These areas have “house” wines and they are not part of my inventory. If I want to put some other inventory wines in her area for her to open without asking me, then I will take them off my inventory when they move to “her” area.
Old school - pen and 3x7 inch “memo book”. Manually calculate the number drank the previous year on New Years Day (it’s a ritual now). Audit every year or so. Enjoy flipping through my book to see what I have, need to buy and drink.
I have such a place as well, although I tend to keep those in inventory on CT. But at least it narrows the possibilities - if it’s a “house” wine and gone, it’s easy enough to “drink” whatever I see in inventory of the wine.
One night many years ago I came home from work and a bottle of 82 Mouton was open and about half gone. We were going to have pizza for dinner. (Since I no longer have or drink Bordeaux, this was a long time ago.) Anyway, no crime in that, but I decided my wife needed her own part of the cellar. If the same thing happened now with a 99 Rousseau Chambertin I would be sad.
My wife doesn’t pull any wine from the cellar at our house. (“I don’t know what you have where. I don’t bother.”) If she is cooking a meal and wants to open something she buys a bottle of something when she is shopping. It helps that most of our local markets have nice selections.
Or she buys cases of inexpensive wines that she can open without regard.
Oh huzzah - we are entering the discussion again about The Idiotic Thing my Wife Did/Does with the Wine, which is a subset of the My Wife Doesn’t Understand Anything about Wine discussion, also closely related to the My Wife Gets Angry When I Spend too Much on Wine topic. Always a pleasure to revisit these gems.
Not at all. I’m the geek in the family and my Wife is neutral. She likes what I open as long as it’s Zinfandel, Sauv Blanc, a Dry Rosé, Gewürtz, some Pinots, Beaujoulais/Carbonic reds… Otherwise we drink different wines.
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
