If you have 250 or more btls in your cellar, why are u not on CT?

[Anton_D]

I approach my cellar in the same way one chooses which peyote button to consume: make a pilgrimage along the sacred route from the dining/social area to the cellar. Ask the wine God (I use Bacchus) for a good experience, and for the enjoyment of my guests and their good health (and for their animals and plants.) When I reach the cellar I perform a ritual bath along with prayers and dancing before going in to hunt wine. I follow the Tao and wait for the bottle to present itself. Then, consume it overnight while performing spiritual ceremonies and dances.

Over-organizing my cellar would alter the harmony and balance of what I have collected and placed in my cellar in accordance with the Tao of Wine.

Eventually, the correct bottles will be consumed at the correct time.

Plus, I would rather give up on an enjoyable hobby before I would want to organize it. My motto is: “A place for everything, and everything all over the place.”

Organized or not organized. Yes, there are two paths you can go by. But, in the long run there’s still time to change the road we’re on, either way.

Lastly, pay attention when you put your damn wine away and you’ll know where things are!

[Jon_Drummond]

CT is brilliant.

People who state that “Excel works, why change?” are like people staying with typewriters (“still types”) when there are modern computers around, or those old fogies that still have early 2000s Nokia 8250/3310 cell phones (“still makes calls and sms”) when there are smartphones around.

[Eric_Egan]

I’m well into four figures and don’t use cellartracker, or any other form of cataloguing system because I find it tedious - both to update and to keep a running tally. I find cellartracker’s design about as compelling as a toad biscuit. Also, I keep having to enter in new wines and vintages (I guess I buy a lot of obscure stuff), which takes ages. Generally, I’ve not taken great pleasure in looking at lists - I prefer to just look at the bottles. I know what I’ve got, apart from the odd little surprise here and there, which I find pleasing rather than annoying.

I’ve tried to keep things updated on CT before but just can’t be bothered in the long run - each to their own I guess.

[PaulMills]

I started using CT with a little over 100 bottles I think. I was using Excel before. Entering data in CT was easy and I did it over a few days. I now have about 800 bottles and would be willing to enter the bottles in CT now if I had too. I think it is a valuable tool for this hobby. It is nice to be able to find TNs and values on my wines, and so many others.

The only bad thing about CT is that Eric is an enabler in helping us find this data so easy and buy more wine. Bad, Eric. Bad.

[Matthew_King]

I have a several thousand bottles split between my home cellar and a storage facility, which are located thousands of miles apart. I manage them with two spreadsheets. Over the past decade, my experience is that the spreadsheets are wrong less than 5% of the time. Most of these errors are insignificant (a bottle is in an adjacent column or row). A few months ago I signed up for Cellartracker, but when I saw what was involved in the conversion, I really couldn’t justify it. So let me turn the question around, if I have spreadsheets that are working for me, why do I need Cellartracker?

1. You won’t need to enter the details about the wines, since we have 3 million of them.
2. You benefit from the wisdom of the community: millions of images, tasting notes, drinking windows
3. We partner with 25 different professional wine publications, perhaps some of which you subscribe to. The content is automatically integrated for co-subscribers.
4. You already store in the cloud, a key benefit of CT.
5. You can get an automatic appraisal for insurance.
6. You can barcode bottles. You can do a million other things.

Eric: You list the benefits of a service that has been well received by market. Now honest question — what do you not like about the product? What areas are you guys working to improve? What functionality would you love to add?

[Kris_Patten]

I pay for CT each time I go on, which isnt very often, because I like to support Eric. I don’t keep up with it or use it because I have an organized cellar by region and I like to “shop” in there when we have wine from it…and with a kid, kid on way, wife, one round of golf per week, I like to spend time with my family, play my 1 round and sleep vs. input bottles.

[Paul_McCourt]

I have an account. However, I am WAY too lazy to keep track of my wine. Off site keeps track of what’s there but I don’t think I’ve even looked at the inventory they send in over a year.

[GregT]

1. You won’t need to enter the details about the wines, since we have 3 million of them.
2. You benefit from the wisdom of the community: millions of images, tasting notes, drinking windows
3. We partner with 25 different professional wine publications, perhaps some of which you subscribe to. The content is automatically integrated for co-subscribers.
4. You already store in the cloud, a key benefit of CT.
5. You can get an automatic appraisal for insurance.
6. You can barcode bottles. You can do a million other things.

5, and 6 are interesting. I can’t imagine why I would barcode a bottle personally, but I can see that being quite useful for someone who is using CT for business.

As far as the others, I can also see them being more or less useful for some folks, but it’s not too hard to enter the detail you want - say producer and vintage, and if you care, the composition and price. As for drinking windows, if you put them in yourself, what good does it do to put them in at all? You know when you want to drink it. And frankly, at some point you become confident enough in your own assessment not to care about someone else’s suggested drinking window or TN. If I have the wine, I’ll eventually drink it and find out what it tastes like for myself.

The integration with other publications is also an interesting feature, but the only one I subscribe to that reviews wine is the free WS I get through those free magazine offers from unrelated purchases. And remember, MS Excel is in the cloud these days.

This is no criticism or argument, CT is fine and were I just starting to collect enough wine to want to write it down, I’d probably log in and put things in CT and pay more attention to the opinions of others. But it hasn’t been too difficult keeping track the way I’ve been doing it.

Edit to add: based on excel, can you tell what your collection is by region? by varietal?
consumption by month? by quarter?
largest holding by producer? purchase trend over time?
I guess data geekiness is only interesting to a handful of people tho

Why would you not be able to tell every one of those things? Regularly poring over that kind of data would be of absolutely no interest to me, but but there is a sort function in Excel.

More to the point - if you like Cote Rotie and you’ve been buying more Cote Rotie lately, don’t you think you’d know that without resort to some historical data? If not, maybe look at the number of bottles consumed nightly and cut back!

[Scott_Brunson]

Haha, I have quite a bit more than that and have no CT, chart, spreadsheet or rationale storage methodology. I was just grabbing more and more lockers. One day…

Wow. Serious question - how do you remember everything you own? Wouldn’t you have over the hill and forgotten stuff just due to memory lapse?

Separately, If u have excel you can bulk upload with Eric’s Help.

My collection had to be started over following the 2004 hurricanes in FL, so the majority of my wines in storage are vintage 2005 to the present. More mature wines that I have backfilled are in more accessible places, like my wine fridges. Now if I had “cellars” like the big ballers - think Doc Glasser - I might pay someone to organize it.

I’ll drive up and help. We can drink Gonon and blame Fu

[jon_leifer]

CJ: I will cop to having used a spiral notebook…got to about 600 or so bottles then noticed a significant palate change and found myself crossing off more bottles than I was adding as I was drinking down certain sections of my cellar…After a while I just stopped entering or crossing off bottles, I guess I entered/exited the apathy phase re inventorying the cellar and have now accelerated the drinking down my cellar phase as I am well beyond my sunset years. Will be spending some time wine tasting in Oregon and Washington in June, two areas I am not familiar with winewise, hence the trip…wife and I will also run a few races while we are out there…No clue re how this might impact my cellar but clearly it won’t reduce it.

[JDavisRoby]

I started using CT after I hit about 100 bottles. I love it. I’m a data geek so it feeds that part of me. But, I don’t always use it to find bottles to open. And now that my collection has grown I still find surprises when I go down to the cellar looking for a bottle. That is fun.

From an entry standpoint I typically enter wines when I order them. Just part of my routine. The bottles I buy locally are a bit harder but the barcode and image search function in the app make it easier.

I would like to see more functionality in the app. Probably the number one feature request would be the ability to filter by location when in the ready to drink function. I have my home cellar and two different off sites so sometimes I do want to see what’s ready to drink in the house without going to my PC.

[Eric_LeVine]

I have a several thousand bottles split between my home cellar and a storage facility, which are located thousands of miles apart. I manage them with two spreadsheets. Over the past decade, my experience is that the spreadsheets are wrong less than 5% of the time. Most of these errors are insignificant (a bottle is in an adjacent column or row). A few months ago I signed up for Cellartracker, but when I saw what was involved in the conversion, I really couldn’t justify it. So let me turn the question around, if I have spreadsheets that are working for me, why do I need Cellartracker?

1. You won’t need to enter the details about the wines, since we have 3 million of them.
2. You benefit from the wisdom of the community: millions of images, tasting notes, drinking windows
3. We partner with 25 different professional wine publications, perhaps some of which you subscribe to. The content is automatically integrated for co-subscribers.
4. You already store in the cloud, a key benefit of CT.
5. You can get an automatic appraisal for insurance.
6. You can barcode bottles. You can do a million other things.

Eric: You list the benefits of a service that has been well received by market. Now honest question — what do you not like about the product? What areas are you guys working to improve? What functionality would you love to add?

We have a LONG way to go on mobile. See my earlier post.
Performance could always be better.
I still have a long list of thousand of features and tweaks I would like to add, but our progress is slower than I would like. The next big feature area, pretty long overdue, is better storage management. (e.g. letting you describe your physical cellar, capacities, ability to query empties.)
Also, despite a remarkable amount of data, we are nowhere near prescriptive enough to let people leverage the data for recommendations of what to purchase.
We would also like to take things to the next level, e.g. I buy wine from a partnering retailer and it is automatically added to my cellar.

All of this of course would to be optional and something a user wants to use – not foisted upon you.

[David_K2]

I also can’t imagine not using CT to keep track of my cellar. Then again, I also have zero unread emails in my inbox, so it may be a personality thing.

[Mark_Y]

1. You won’t need to enter the details about the wines, since we have 3 million of them.
2. You benefit from the wisdom of the community: millions of images, tasting notes, drinking windows
3. We partner with 25 different professional wine publications, perhaps some of which you subscribe to. The content is automatically integrated for co-subscribers.
4. You already store in the cloud, a key benefit of CT.
5. You can get an automatic appraisal for insurance.
6. You can barcode bottles. You can do a million other things.

Eric: You list the benefits of a service that has been well received by market. Now honest question — what do you not like about the product? What areas are you guys working to improve? What functionality would you love to add?

We have a LONG way to go on mobile. See my earlier post.
Performance could always be better.
I still have a long list of thousand of features and tweaks I would like to add, but our progress is slower than I would like. The next big feature area, pretty long overdue, is better storage management. (e.g. letting you describe your physical cellar, capacities, ability to query empties.)
Also, despite a remarkable amount of data, we are nowhere near prescriptive enough to let people leverage the data for recommendations of what to purchase.
We would also like to take things to the next level, e.g. I buy wine from a partnering retailer and it is automatically added to my cellar.

All of this of course would to be optional and something a user wants to use – not foisted upon you.

Hey Eric. Love the insight!
Just curious what is the biggest obstacle from the step changes u want, the integration of machine learning, etc? Is it just engineering resources? Or is there hardware/technology limitations?

[Larry_Stein]

I have around 975 bottles. I don’t use CellarTracker. I keep my inventory on a spreadsheet. Wines are grouped by country and/or region. I know which shelf where each bottle is stored in my offsite lockers. I’m fanatical about data entry. However, there are currently 3 bottles that I can’t account for. That’s the fault of the end-user (me). GIGO. I always keep a current version of the spreadsheet in my Dropbox. I can access that on my phone when I’m at my locker. I don’t want to have to pay for more cloud access that I don’t need.

[J_Rock]

I just started collecting a few months ago and only have about 50 bottles, but I already LOVE CT. It’s soooo useful. I love everything from the tasting notes, ratings, drinking window suggestions, drinkability report, and wine-searcher link. Not only does it help me keep track of what I have and where it’s located (and this will be more important as my collection grows), but it also helps me plan my collection strategy. For example, it makes it easy for me to see if I’m not diversifying enough or I’m falling behind somewhere. It also quickly gives me a picture of when my bottles will be in their prime, so it’s easier for me to ensure I’m buying bottles in a fashion that will ensure I have good bottles to drink every year.

Also, just for the record, I’m probably on the younger side of CT users and I only use the desktop version. I just enter bottles as I purchase, as they’re delivered (if applicable), if I move them, and after I drink them. I don’t think it’s a hassle (unlike my Excel sheet full of notes) and I enjoy managing my collection on CT.

[John_O]

1. You won’t need to enter the details about the wines, since we have 3 million of them.
2. You benefit from the wisdom of the community: millions of images, tasting notes, drinking windows
3. We partner with 25 different professional wine publications, perhaps some of which you subscribe to. The content is automatically integrated for co-subscribers.
4. You already store in the cloud, a key benefit of CT.
5. You can get an automatic appraisal for insurance.
6. You can barcode bottles. You can do a million other things.

Eric: You list the benefits of a service that has been well received by market. Now honest question — what do you not like about the product? What areas are you guys working to improve? What functionality would you love to add?

We have a LONG way to go on mobile. See my earlier post.
Performance could always be better.
I still have a long list of thousand of features and tweaks I would like to add, but our progress is slower than I would like. The next big feature area, pretty long overdue, is better storage management. (e.g. letting you describe your physical cellar, capacities, ability to query empties.)
Also, despite a remarkable amount of data, we are nowhere near prescriptive enough to let people leverage the data for recommendations of what to purchase.
We would also like to take things to the next level, e.g. I buy wine from a partnering retailer and it is automatically added to my cellar.

All of this of course would to be optional and something a user wants to use – not foisted upon you.

“Also, despite a remarkable amount of data, we are nowhere near prescriptive enough to let people leverage the data for recommendations of what to purchase.”

• that would be a game changer.

[Gerhard_P]

Why should I?

I have an access file made of my own that I can sort exactly to my needs … I´m pretty sure with CT I cannot do this as well.
Moreover: the most work is to type in my purchased bottles and (still more challenging) to delete the emptied bottles … a work I´m trying to do in my own file with more or less success … to change everything into CT would cost me a month of daily 10 hours … sorry.

BTW: I´m registered on CT - but not with my wines, only to follow some TN.

[Sarah_Kirschbaum]

I think people would be surprised at how quickly the conversion to CT can be done, if you have anything like a decent spreadsheet. But anyway…

Excel is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s a work horse, not an interactive experience or user friendly. That may not matter to folks, I get it, as not everyone considers playing around with cellar data to be a fun way to waste an hour. (or more!) It’s true that a large number of things CT does can be done without much effort in Excel - everyone can sort and filter, I assume - and other functions can be replicated as well. Still, it’s much more cumbersome. I’m a power user of Excel due to my job, so I can easily run pivot tables and the like which would replicate a lot of the most useful functions. But pivoting out my cellar by region, for instance, in Excel would not create the highly functional and elegant output that running my cellar by region in CT creates. From there, in CT, it’s a simple matter to drill down by levels and then back up again. Sure, I can do that in Excel, too, but it’s a lot more complicated, and doesn’t feel nearly as fun as playing with CT. I also greatly value the community information and notes, which, obviously, one can’t get with an Excel spreadsheet, no matter how many keyboard shortcuts once knows. All that said, there are some things I prefer to do in Excel - at one point, we wanted to look over the singletons in cellar (where we only have one bottle) to see which should get drunk soon, and would thus create us a valuable slot in the racks. I found it much easier to export to Excel to make this happen, what with eliminating the expensive singles, or really young ones, to come up with a Drink Up list. That anecdote only takes me back to the beauty of CT, though. With all wines in CT, I can export any or all of it to Excel and play there as well.

I don’t understand the comments which seem to suggest that using CT is in conflict with physically “shopping” your cellar. When pulling bottles, we almost always go downstairs and look around. Stand in front of the champagne section and see what strikes our fancy, that kind of thing. Then we delete the bottle out of inventory and enter a note after consumption. Like others, we sometimes even “discover” forgotten bottles - yes, they were in CT, but I don’t spend much time reading over my inventory, and things get forgotten. I don’t see having the power of CT in place to be at all restrictive when it comes to perusing my cellar in person. It doesn’t force us to choose bottles online before pulling them downstairs.

[Yao_C]

I find cellartracker’s design about as compelling as a toad biscuit

This actually makes me glad because I’ve disliked it this whole time and thought it was just me

People who state that “Excel works, why change?” are like people staying with typewriters (“still types”) when there are modern computers around, or those old fogies that still have early 2000s Nokia 8250/3310 cell phones (“still makes calls and sms”) when there are smartphones around.

Your comparison is maybe a little exaggerated. I think we might be solving for a completely different set of considerations in our lives