One of the biggest problems I had when I started drinking wine professionally was organizing it. How do you keep track of a couple of hundred bottles of wine, where the number changes almost daily? And how do you do that when your Excel skills are practically non-existent?
That's when I discovered Cellar Tracker. It's free, web-based software that lets you track what you own, what you drink, what you like, and what you want to buy. And it's equally handy for someone who wants to track just a couple of dozen bottles of wine.
The interface can be a bit clunky, though it has improved over the last six months or so. Its database, on the other hand, is so complete that you don't have to do much more than type the name of the wine you want to enter, and then a screen loads with all the wines it could be. After that, it's just a matter of clicking through choices to find the wine you want.
It's feature-rich (I believe that's the correct software term), and includes all sorts of stuff I have never tried, like scanning barcode labels and for-pay services like professional wine reviews.
But you really don't need the latter. One of my favorite features is the community tasting notes, where you can see what others think of the wine you just finished. What do I like about the community notes? The diversity of opinion, which ranges from raves to the exact opposite. This, after all, is what wine is about. One problem, though: Too many Cellar Tracker users use scores to rate wines, and we all know how the Wine Curmudgeon feels about that.
Cellar Tracker guru Eric LeVine is a former Microsoft developer (which probably explains some of the clunkiness) who understands both wine and software. This differentiates his package from others, which seem to be lacking in one or the other areas. And I know, because I have tried almost all of them.
