ThePortForum.com

...what do people use?

A simple excel spreadsheet with a few columns (shipper, date, acquisition cost, condition and location)? Something more customised/complicated (Turnbull Time....)?

Or one of the commercial sofware programmes available online? (if so, any recommendations?)

With an increasing number of wines now split over 7 locations (3 of which being bonded warehouses), I think it is probably time for me to become a bit more rigorous in logging things in and out! I'm also intrigued how THRA can track the average age of his cellar and JacobH's "Port Statistics" auto-update.

I use a spreadsheet, which records what I have, when I bought it, where it came from and where it is stored (and a whole pile of other things). I have a separate spreadsheet that tracks my tasting notes and derives various statistics from these.

Neither is very sophisticated, but both are perfectly adequate for my needs.

I did once look at using cellar tracker, mostly because of the ability this has to allocate and print a bar code for every bottle which a hand scanner can read and feed updates to your cellar list. However, time meant that I never quite got round to it...

I use three things:

1. My online inventory at Seckford Wines, which is fully maintained by Seckford Wines with no help from me.

2. A spreadsheet owned and maintained by someone else here that contains details of the shared cases that he and I have stored at Seckford Wines.

3. I look in my wine fridges to see what's there.

This method is very low maintenance, is cost free (if you ignore storage fees, which is always the correct thing to do in any cost calculation), and has very little risk of human error by the user.

Derek

http://www.cellartracker.com is the best online cellar management tool by far. Eric, a former Microsoft programer, has done an amazing job.

I highly recommend it as it's the only one I use and have loved it. It is by far the largest on-line cellar management program out there and it's free, unless you want to make a small donation each year, which is worth it (IIRC, you get access to a few more things if you donate).

Andy Velebil wrote:http://www.cellartracker.com is the best online cellar management tool by far. Eric, a former Microsoft programer, has done an amazing job.

I highly recommend it as it's the only one I use and have loved it. It is by far the largest on-line cellar management program out there and it's free, unless you want to make a small donation each year, which is worth it (IIRC, you get access to a few more things if you donate).

I use Cellartracker as well. It is great, easy to use and has all the functionalities I want from a cellar management tool. Although you can use it free of charge, I am more than happy to give an annual donation to Eric for his magnificent work.

Thanks - had a little play on cellartracker - very simple and i like the way that it integrates with the TN database there.

The only issue I can see is that there does not seem to be an easy way to add customised columns - in particular to distinguish between ports held in bond and those fully paid, or bottle price and case price. Plus couldn't see a way of changing the price to £GBP, but i have not looked thoroughly (and recognise that these are not essential features...).

Will also investigate the excel export feature - perhaps it wouldn't be too much hassle to keep a separate larger database at home that can be easily updated every now and again with a cut and paste of recent purchases in order to deal with the "extras" mentioned above.

DRT wrote: This method is very low maintenance, is cost free (if you ignore storage fees, which is always the correct thing to do in any cost calculation), and has very little risk of human error by the user.

Your post made me laugh, in particular when i got to the end and remembered this

.

I've written my own little application in Excel, complete with dialogs and extensive analysis tools, which I've updated several times now (it even chooses my next bottle for home consumption..)

However, the file size is getting a bit mighty now and I plan a fairly major re-config when I take my winter break this year. If anyone is interested, I could save a copy that is empty of data for others to play with.

Tom

I use a somewhat complex excel spreadsheet:
one tab shows a matrix of years vs houses, with WS scores and quantity calculated.
one tab shows current inventory, another indicates bottles that have been drunk (and notes)
one tab shows location in the cellar.

There are a few others, to assist me in calculating prices, insurance, who's adopted what, etc.

i just found out that cellartracker has a nice app for the Ipad.
CellarVU

First impression is good!

uncle tom wrote:(it even chooses my next bottle for home consumption..)

I think this is fabulous. Now you just need a robotic hand to do the opening and decanting for you!

AHB wrote:I did once look at using cellar tracker, mostly because of the ability this has to allocate and print a bar code for every bottle which a hand scanner can read and feed updates to your cellar list. However, time meant that I never quite got round to it...

If you want to pursue this with your current set-up, it’s not that difficult to generate barcodes if you have the correct font installed; it’s mostly just a case of printing your bottle’s reference in that font. A barcode reader is also a pretty simple piece of equipment, most just read the barcode and return its value as if they were a keyboard input, so you’d just need a quick macro or something to make use of the data.

RAYC wrote:JacobH's "Port Statistics" auto-update.

I keep records of what I have drunk in an XML file (you may need to ‟view source” to see its structure); and whether it is a glass, half-bottle or bottle. Generating the statistics is then just a case of extracting the data and averaging them (for which I use XSL), although it’s always going to be a touch inaccurate because a glass can mean anything from a 5cl taste at a big tasting, to a bottle shared between 4 people. That’s then, theoretically, feed into a script every night that generates the image, though cron (the programme which runs a script at a certain time each day) on the server I’m running it on seems not to be working very well at present.