A whisky collection catalogued only by name and purchase price is not a collection database. It is a shopping list with a dollar figure attached.
The fields that matter for a serious whisky catalog are the ones that capture the technical identity of each bottle — the ones that distinguish a Springbank 15 Year old Official Bottling from a Springbank 15 bottled by a third-party independent bottler under a different label. Without Distillery separate from Bottler, you cannot make that distinction. And that distinction is the entire value question for a bottle in the secondary market.
The Distillery and Bottler Split
This is the field decision that separates collectors from casual buyers.
Distillery is where the spirit was produced and aged. Bottler is who put it in glass and labeled it. For official bottlings, they are the same entity. For independent bottlings — the Signatorys, the Douglas Laings, the Gordon & MacPhails — the distillery is Caol Ila or Mortlach or Bunnahabhain, but the bottler is someone else entirely. A Caol Ila 2010 13 Year Signatory Vintage Cask Strength and a Caol Ila 12 Year Official Bottling are not comparable expressions even though they share a distillery, and a database that cannot make that distinction cannot help you build a coherent collection.
The Region field — Highland, Lowland, Islay, Speyside, Campbeltown, Island, Tennessee — is how you track the geographical distribution of your collection. A collector who realizes they have 23 Speyside whiskies and three Islays, or who wants to add depth in the underrepresented regions, can see the shape of their collection at a glance.
Type goes deep: Single Malt, Blended, Grain, Cask Strength, Single Cask, Bourbon, Corn, Rye, Rye Malt, Wheat, Single Barrel, Single Pot, Vatted. These are not decorative categories. Cask Strength is a technical statement about bottling proof. Single Cask means one barrel, no vatting, finite production. The type classifications are the vocabulary that whisky conversations happen in, and they are the filter layer for comparing expressions within your own collection.
ABV, Age, and Bottling Year as the Technical Fingerprint
These three integer fields together define the technical identity of the expression.
Alcohol % at cask strength ranges from 54% to 67% and above. Even at the same ABV, different expressions from the same distillery in the same year will behave differently in the glass depending on the individual cask. But having the exact ABV recorded means you know when a bottle you are opening is at standard 46% or at a 61.8% cask strength draw from a first-fill Oloroso sherry butt — and you pour accordingly.
Age is the statement on the label. Bottling Year is the calendar year the whisky went into glass. Together they let you calculate the approximate distillation year, and they let you track how the same distillery's expressions have evolved across different bottling vintages. A Glendronach 18 bottled in 2010 and the same expression bottled in 2019 are not identical whiskies — the cask profiles that fed each run were drawn from different decades of stock.
The Purchase Record and the Tasted Volume Flag
Purchasing date, Price (EUR), and Purchased From location together make this a collection register rather than just a tasting database.
The GPS-tagged location of purchase is underrated. When you are standing at a specialist retailer in Copenhagen with a Tasted/sample bottle logged from a distillery visit last year, and you are deciding whether the full-size purchase makes sense at the current price, the purchase location from the sample record tells you exactly what the comparable retail environment looked like when you first encountered this expression.
The Volume field includes a "Tasted/sample" option. This is the right way to track a sample purchase or a pour from a bar tasting session — it goes into the catalog as a properly specified entry with region, type, ABV, and notes, even though no bottle was acquired. The rating and notes from a sample often determine whether you later buy a full bottle.
Barcode scanning is the entry shortcut for bottles with standard EAN barcodes. Scan the bottle at the shop before you buy it, and the entry is pre-populated where the barcode database has the details. Edit the fields that need correction, add your own notes, and the record is built before you leave the shelf.