Within the last month I posted about finding a bottle of wine I forgot I had in my cellar and what a treat it was.  At the time I was convinced that I wouldn’t need any kind of cellar tracking system.  Fast forward a few weeks and my opinion has completely changed.  Obviously I will never be a politician with my flip-flopping ways, thanks goodness!  The catalyst for this dramatic shift in my inventory outlook was a blind tasting I attended.  I needed to bring a wine, and it had to be off the certified sommelier testing list, so one of six varietals.  I was just going to stop and get a bottle on the way, but decided to check my wine fridge in case I had something.  So I commensed to looking through every bottle to see what I had before selecting a 2004 Australian Shiraz.  Half way through my search I realized I needed an inventory system.

My initial thought was to create a spreadsheet of what I had and manage it that way.  Simple, clean, effective, and always available, what’s not to like.  But as I started creating the list of what I wanted to be able to do with the system I quickly realized I needed something more powerful.  Thus my search for an online solution began.  I decided I would seek out and review 3 different options to choose from, and so a blog post is born.  But, before we get into the reviews let’s look at what I was looking for.

I don’t have a particularly impressive wine cellar.  I have a little 40 bottle wine fridge that at any given time has between 30 and 40 bottles in it.  But you never know where life will take you so I wanted to find a system that was simple enough to use with my list, but expansive enough to grow into a full cellar…just in case.  Some of the other things on the list of features I was looking for were;

• A searchable DB of wines to choose from
• The ability to add wines if they are not in the DB
• The ability to save tasting notes on wines I drink
• Specific details of each wine including region and sub-region
• An integrated smartphone app ideally with a barcode scanner
• The ability to import/export my entire cellar
• The ability to create a wishlist of wines

After searching for a while and asking my social network folks for opinions (thank you everyone that provided feedback) I settled on 3 sites to test out; ManageYourCellar, VinCellar, and CellarTracker (beta).  The basics were compared and valued in the below spreadsheet as a starting point based on my criteria.  Additional observations were then noted before reaching my final conclusion.

Additional notes for each site:
ManageYourCellar -

• The site itself is not particularly “pretty” to look at, but it is intuitive and has a lot of information and data you can store on your wines.
• Most wines that I tried to add were found and if a wine wasn’t found it was simple enough to add one.
• They have a facebook app that lets you manage your cellar from the social networking site; I could not get it working.  I probably could have if I worked at figuring out what was wrong, but that really didn’t interest me.
• You do have the ability to access the site via a mobile web browser, but you can’t access or add to your wishlist from it.
• Wines can only be saved with one “region”  it seems.  You can choose either a country or a region in a country, but not both.
• Of all the sites this one seems to have the simplest method for importing and exporting your cellar.  A .csv file with the proper column order and you are ready to go, nice and simple.
• No smartphone app