"Vinyolo — cellar tracking with a visual cellar map + critic-score auto-fill. Beta testers wanted"

I built a wine cellar app and I need 50 people who will beat it up. Free year of Pro, no credit card, your data stays yours.

I’m a wine lover and avid collector. I have a cellar converted from a bedroom (much to my wife’s chagrin) presently storing about 1,500 bottles, mostly CA reds. I’ve bought and sold bottles here, even ran a small weekly auction in this very corner a couple of years ago.

Like a lot of you I lived in CellarTracker for years. I kept wanting three things it doesn’t do the way I wanted: a visual map of my actual cellar, critic scores that fill themselves in, and pairing help that knows what’s in MY cellar. So I built it. It’s called Vinyolo (vinyolo.com) and it’s ready for people other than me to break it.

What it does:

  • Visual cellar map — your racks, cases, and slots on screen. Drag bottles to move them, multi-select to move/sell/consume in bulk. There’s a tabular view too with every filter you’d expect, and CSV in/out.
  • Critic scores that fill themselves in — a Chrome extension collects published critic scores and market prices from Wine-Searcher (plus K&L and Wine.com) as you browse. Scores land in a shared pool matched by LWIN, so once any member’s bottle is matched, everyone’s copy of that wine auto-fills. The more of us collecting, the better everyone’s data gets.
  • AI pairing assistant — “dinner at [restaurant] Saturday, need 2 reds and a white” and it recommends from your cellar, with locations, matched to the restaurant’s actual cuisine and price level.
  • Palate profiling — a short quiz builds your taste profile, and every wine in the database gets a personal match score against it. Recommendations stop being generic.
  • Varietal explorer — browse taste profiles across ~12M wines by varietal and region; useful for “what does Trousseau from the Jura actually taste like” moments before you buy blind.
  • Label scan — point your camera at a bottle, it identifies the wine and fills in the details.
  • Import from CellarTracker — export your CT CSV, import it, done. Wines get matched to the LWIN database automatically.

The tester deal: first 50 people get 12 months of Vinyolo Pro (unlimited cellar size, unlimited scans — normally $99/yr) free. No credit card, ever, for this. Reply here or DM me and I’ll send you a personal one-time code you redeem on your profile page. When the year ends, nothing renews silently: I’ll ask once, politely, if you want to keep Pro at the permanent founder rate — 50% off forever ($49/yr instead of $99). If not, you drop to the free plan (1,000 bottles) and keep everything — full access to view, edit, and export your cellar. Your data is never held hostage. Ever. CSV export works on every plan, always.

What I’m asking for in return: use it for real and tell me what’s broken, what’s confusing, and what’s missing. Blunt is good — this forum’s specialty. Testers get a Founding Tester badge, and the people who contribute most won’t go unrecognized when this thing grows up.

Platforms: web works everywhere now. The iPhone and Android beta apps and the Chrome score-collector extension are all one page — install links and step-by-step instructions at Vinyolo | Get the App (also reachable anytime from inside Vinyolo: tap your profile avatar — the orange circle with your initial, top right — and choose “Get the App”).

Rough edges I already know about: it’s a beta run by one person. The score collector is Wine-Searcher-first (other sources are being expanded). If you find something ugly, that’s exactly what I’m here for.

Cheers, and thanks — happy to answer anything in the thread.

2 Likes

We launched food pairings 9 months ago.

We integrate TWO MILLION professional reviews from THREE DOZEN publications for people WHO PAY THESE REVIEWERS for their contents. For the past TWENTY years. Literally no one in the entire history of this pathetic industry has ever done this. What are you doing? Leaking pro reviews for free? What is your value add here?

Not making claims about visual cellaring yet. But that is finally going to happen in stages soon as well.

" Chrome extension collects published critic scores and market prices from Wine-Searcher (plus K&L and Wine.com) as you browse. Scores land in a shared pool matched by LWIN, so once any member’s bottle is matched, everyone’s copy of that wine auto-fills. The more of us collecting, the better everyone’s data gets."

Your value proposition is “I wil automate the scraping of pro reviews from retailer websites” and you don’t have to subscribe or pay for these things. Because “free goodies” hurrah!!!

You need to look much more carefully at the IP terms of the publications and retailers. Copyright violations are punishable at $30,000 per incident. And you are willfully doing that at scale. Horrid. Absolutely horrid.

3 Likes

Eric — respect, sincerely; CT set the standard and pays publications for their content, which deserves credit. But I do want to state precisely what this tool does, because “scraping pro reviews” isn’t it. Vinyolo never touches review content — no tasting notes, no prose, not a sentence of any publication’s writing. When a member is browsing a public retail page, they can save the numeric score and the price shown there into their own cellar records — the same facts collectors have always jotted into spreadsheets. That’s the entire scope, and excluding review text was a deliberate design decision from day one.

I take IP seriously. If any publication or retailer has a concern, I’ll engage with them directly and promptly: howard.sun@vinyolo.com. Happy to continue this one-on-one, Eric — and either way I’ll let the thread get back to wine.

You should look more carefully at the IP terms of the publications. You have legal exposure…

Appreciated and point taken — a proper review is underway. Bests.