Reviewed by uncyherb
Do you like wine? Silly question really. I’m not sure I actually know anyone who says no to this question. But that might be partly due to the crowd I hang with. *Got an iPhone? Once again, a dumb question. Everyone’s got one now. If you don’t it’s only because Apple can’t make the little buggers quick enough.
So we’ve established you’ve got, or are getting, an iPhone, and you’re a fan of wine. Nothing odd there. And since we’re talking about nothing being out of the ordinary, you probably don’t know heaps about wine.
You may have taken the “are you a wine tragic” test on WineWeek.com.au and barely moved the needle. That’s cool. It’s a huge secret in the wine industry – but the guys like me who are nuts about the fermented grape juice are actually a pretty small part of the market. A really small part. Like maybe less than 5%. The rest of wine that’s bought is sold to people who just enjoy it, rather than turn into nut-bags with their own websites about the stuff.
But the classic problem for that 95% of the wine buyers out there is remembering what wine you’ve had, and what’s worth buying again. It’s one of the reasons why Joe Public buys the same thing week after week: He’s found something he likes and bugger him if he can remember that wine his mate dragged out 6 months ago when every bottle looks more or less the same to him.
This is where Cellar steps up. Download it onto your iPhone and you’ll never be at a loss to remember any bottle you’ve ever had.
At the start Cellar is a great way to manage a small to medium sized collection of wines at home. But where it really hits its straps is that you can store information on bottles that you no longer have, or even only ever tasted a glass of.
To add any bottle to the Cellar app, you add a few details about it – including bottle shape, colour and so on, plus name, variety and so on. You also get to customise the bottle by using the camera in your phone to snap off a picture of the label, with Cellar automatically wrapping onto the bottle you’ve just made.
Once you’ve added a bottle to the application it is automatically stored in your “Cellar”. It’s a great way of keeping track of what’s under the stairs without having to go moving boxes around to see if that Pinot Noir was a 2004 or 2005.
But possibly the real strength of Cellar right now is what happens when you drink a bottle. Tap on any bottle in your cellar and as well as details on it, you’ll see a little arrow. Touching this allows you to do one of two things. You can throw the bottle away – effectively deleting it from the app. The other option is to send it to the ‘Garage’.
The Garage is a place that store all the wine you’ve had, and keeps a record of them. Polished off a nice Grosset Polish Hill Riesling? Downed a William Downie Pinot with some mates? Chuck into the garage and the next time you’re out shopping for wine you can easily scroll through your past tipples and find the wine you’re looking for. Because you can add notes on each bottle you can include information like who you drank it with to help remind you in case you had a few too many bottle to move from your Cellar to the Garage that night!
Cellar has a lot of things going for it, especially considering it’s just a version 1 release.
But there are some, minor, quibbles I’ve got with it.
The label photos don’t always match up with the cropping box that you use to zoom in the photo you take. It leads to some labels showing too much bottle, which detracts from the ‘realism’ of the way your cellar looks.
Next, the options for details on the bottles are relatively limited. That’s not a particularly bad thing for most people – but it does mean that wines with a ‘name’ (such as Bin389, Grange, Hill of Grace and many more) need to have this ‘name’ entered instead of the grape variety. For most people this wont be a major hassle… but as a bit of a wine wanker, it’s mildly annoying to me.
The selection of bottle colours is limited also. The darkest bottle is a moderately dark green. But it’s nothing like the almost black bottles that the average Aussie shiraz comes in. On bottles, the ‘capsule’ definitely limited to looking like a cork, no screw caps here… which is bit of a shame, but nothing major.
The application is also a bit limited at the moment in regards to being a solution for someone with a very large cellar. There is currently no way to sort wines in the cellar or garage, so you would have to manually scroll through every wine if you’re hoping to find a good match for what you’re eating at the same time . I’m sure a way of searching for keywords, grape variety or year will be added to the application soon… but until this feature, along with the ability to import or export your wines from a spreadsheet is added, the application is really only aimed at people who’ve got less than, say, 100 wines lying around at home. But as I said at the start, that’s most people… just take me and my several hundred bottles out of that equation.
Verdict:
Highly Recommended.
Apps for Alcos: Cellar