Cellar Tracker: Keeping Track of Your Wine

So how many bottles of wine do you have? A few bottles? A case or two? Several cases? Do you really know? The first time I took inventory, I was a bit shocked at how many bottles we had accumulated. (And that was before we joined any wine clubs or mailing lists!)

Have you ever opened a bottle that you’d been saving for years—only to wish you’d opened it sooner? Or opened a bottle from a recent vintage and wished you’d given it more time? Would you like to know how much your collection is worth—or do you need to for insurance purposes?

If you have more than a case tucked away or answered yes to any of the above,

you’ve probably already come to the realization that it would be a good idea to keep better track of what’s in your wine collection. In fact, odds are good you have a file or spreadsheet somewhere where you started entering information about your wines. Odds are equally good that you found it tedious and time-consuming to keep the darn thing up to date and eventually gave up. Or maybe you turned to one of the cellar-management software packages that promised to make it easier to catalogue your wines by providing a proprietary database of wine data that included valuations and professional reviews. That was a step in the right direction—but you likely discovered that the database wasn’t as complete as the marketing copy made it sound and you still had to do a lot of data-entry.

Fortunately, a fellow wine-geek has come up with a much better way to manage your cellar: CellarTracker.com. CellarTracker, created by Eric LeVine, lets you leverage the data that other wine-enthusiasts have already entered on over 347,000 different wines and provides access to over a quarter-million wine reviews and ratings. Better yet, you can access all of this information from any computer with access to the Internet. In fact, you can even browse it on your PDA or cell phone.