Wine Programs

I am new to the boards, and I am sure that this is a topic that has been covered extensively. I have looked around, however, and I can't seem to find what I want.
Ideally, I want a database of wines, complete with flavor profiles, tasting notes, scores, and someplace to list where I bought it.
Minimally, I want something that will let me track wines I own, have owned, want to own, or read about and decided to throw in for good measure.
Any thoughts, ideas or help?
Does what I want exist?
-Justin

Welcome to the forum Justin.

I don't know of a database such as you describe in the first part of your post. Perhaps others do. I usually just Google a wine I'm interested in and usually there is a selection of notes to be found.

Unless you carry an inventory of more than 200 different bottles, I don't recommend any of the excellent programs that are around. I fall into this category, and just keep track of things on a simple file on my WP. This works just fine. Others will recommend some of the programs you can buy.

Cheers, Carl

I have MSOffice '97 on my computer. The Access database has a built in template for creating a wine database. I'm sure it could be modified to meet your needs. I never really felt the need for such a thing, but I may play around with it to see if I could use it to help manage my home winemaking hobby.

Cellartracker has pretty much all you have described here. Its easy to input wines you own, keeps a record of what wines you have consumed, has a "wish list" for wines you want to own, keeps tracks of pending orders, and is filled with more tasting notes than you care to read...a few of them are even useful. Give it a try
http://www.cellartracker.com

I second the use of Cellar Tracker. It is an amazing software program. It easily lets you input new wine, keep track of where they are, look at your collection in a zillion different ways (e.g., region or varietal or bottle size or white v. red and on and on).

It keeps track of what you paid for each bottle and, if you wish, its current value.

You can keep track of pending orders.

You can input your own tasting notes (and, not so incidentally, have them posted automatically on this site if you wish). Everyday it provides you with tasting notes that others recently have inputted into CT on wines you have in your cellar.

You can search all the tasting notes of all who use CT if there is some wine you are interested in knowing more about.

CT also is web-based, so you can access your cellar info anywhere you have internet access. [There is an Excel back up option so that you have a spreadsheet of your cellar including all your tasting notes on your own computer, in case one is extra careful, though CT backs everything up in at least two other locations.]

Best of all, there is no charge to use CT if you do not wish to contribute. So, it is costless to try.

If you already have your data in a Word or Excel file, it can be imported.. . they did it for me at CT for no charge. How good is that????

Just to add my agreement to the cellartracker suggestion. It seems to meet most of the requirements, though it's important to remember the amateur nature of many of the tasting notes (I understand there's option to include professional tasting notes for those interested in such things).

regards

Ian

I found that the biggest chore with any recording of wine data is the sheer amount of data entry required, name of wine, varieties, vintage, appellation etc etc.

That is why I concur with the others about CellarTracker. It already has virtually all available wines which means that a simple search brings up the data and you just click to add it into your cellar. Different vintage, no problem just change it. Out of approx 300 wines that I recorded, I had to enter from scratch only 2-3 (I say scratch, but virtually all appellations and varieties are there already.)


As others say -- just give it a go, take 6 bottles of you wine and enter them. Its pretty intuitive and theres a lot of richness in it thats not immediately obvious so if you have any issues just ask on the associated forum.