Figured this forum would be the place to ask this…
I am looking for software to replace my no-longer supported copy of Personal Wine Cellar software. PWC has always been somewhat clunky and slow, but it served its purpose well enough. I just got used to its shortcomings. But when the developers sold it, and it went “to the cloud”, and the new owners started to charge ridiculous fees to use it - I did not upgrade. That was several years ago.
I’ve been surfing for something else, but it looks as if everyone has gone cloud based, pay a monthly fee, or get hammered by adds. I do not want anything to do with “the cloud”.
Any suggestions? I’m tired of shopping. I have about 1500 bottles that will need to be transferred (to whatever I go with), so I’d rather do it one time…
I have no experience with cellartracker and managing it through them…many people seem happy with that.
For many years I have simply kept my 2400 b. cellar on an excel spread sheet, and it has worked well for me. I do not keep track of what I paid for the wines, what current value is, nor what scores they were given…not important to me.
CellarTracker is the obvious choice. Not sure why one would want the hassle of maintaining everything locally. Plus, CT has a tons of functionality your Excel Doc doesn’t. Explore the site…
Another Cellartracker vote. I used to want local only and used Excel for way too long. It stunk for that but I was slow.
Once/if you get onto CT it is super easy to simply download (i.e. export) your cellar to an .xls spreadsheet locally. That way you have a local backup of your cellar. EZ PZ. I do this every now and again. Exporting is a powerful tool.
As a bonus if you already have your cellar in excel you can probably bulk load it into cellar tracker and save a bunch of time. I did this and it got 98% of my wines correct. There is a forum over on the cellartracker site which is super useful and helpful.
+1 for CT, works great and you get the community view. Not the community view is infallible, however it is a point of reference to throw in the mix (TNs, pricing, ratings, drinking windows, etc…). Not aware of anything “local” that does that well. If you desire local and don’t care about the above, Excel is your answer.
I went from a local spreadsheet to an online spreadsheet to Cellar Tracker and don’t regret the move. I like having all the info available from work, phone, or at home and doing tasting notes from parties or restaurants and having those available when I’m shopping later.
I tried to find locally hosted software but didn’t find anything that didn’t require a lot of work on my part (i.e. a free database and report tool, but I’d have to set up all the forms and searches manually). Nothing wine-specific that I could find.
Years ago, I used a software program that stayed on my computer. When they quit supporting it, I looked at options and CT was my best option.
I’m not sure what your opposition is to using something in the cloud, but I would encourage you to look at it. It has exceeded all of my expectations and is very easy to use.
I also like having the app on my phone when I get an email about a sale to double check if I had already purchased that wine (its happened).
It’s a control thing. Plus, web based programs are notorious for screwing the consumer in one way or the other. When everyone I knew was slobbering about how cool Facebook was, I was telling them they were frigging crazy posting personal information on the web, and that FB was nothing more than a creepy stalking program. “Oh no, it’s perfectly harmless, for the betterment of the world…blah, blah, blah…”
The only problem with CellarTracker is the pending delivery functionality. It somehow shows a lot of bottles automagically because I told my wife I wasn’t buying much wine anymore…so the program must have a bug.
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