What Happens When You Open the Wrong Bottle
A 2015 Ribera del Duero Gran Reserva opened in 2024 can be excellent. The same bottle opened in 2021 is closed, tannic, and a waste of forty-five pounds. The only thing standing between you and that mistake is knowing the drinking window — and knowing it fast enough that you are not guessing in front of guests with a corkscrew already in hand.
A cellar without a record system is a cellar you cannot trust. You remember the headline bottles. You do not remember the exact vintage of the case you bought at Majestic during the January sale, or whether the Malbec in the back row is the 2018 you wanted to hold or the 2020 you bought to drink this year.
The Gap Between What You Paid and What It's Worth
The price field and Worth field sit alongside each other, both in GBP, and they are not the same number. Price is what you paid. Worth is your current estimated value — the secondary market price, the auction estimate, the Wine Searcher mid-point, whatever methodology you use to mark the bottle to market. Both fields exist because the relevant question changes depending on what you are doing.
For insurance purposes, Worth is what matters. For deciding whether to drink now or hold, the relationship between Worth and where you bought it (Bought from field) tells you whether you are sitting on a wine that has appreciated past your acquisition price and might be worth selling, or whether it is a drinking wine that should come off the rack before the window closes.
The Value calculated field — #{price}*#{no of bottles} — gives you total rack cost by title, not estimated market value. This is cost-basis accounting for your cellar, which is distinct from current valuation. If you are tracking a case of twelve bottles at £18 each, Value shows £216. If the wine has appreciated to £28 a bottle at auction, Worth captures that — but only if you update Worth manually. The two fields require different maintenance cadences.
Drinking Windows Stored as Years, Not Ranges
The keep until field is an integer storing a year. Not a range, not a text note: a single year that answers the question "hold until when?" At a minimum.
This is deliberately blunt. A structured cellar management system would store an optimal drinking window as a range — drink from 2026 to 2034, for example — with the peak years noted separately. This template is simpler: keep until is the floor. Before that year, leave it alone. After that year, you are in the window or past it — and you should be drinking rather than holding.
The simplicity works because the relevant decision in a personal rack of, say, sixty bottles is almost never "am I in peak window?" It is "should I drink this tonight or wait?" Keep until as a year gives you that answer instantly when you are standing in front of the rack at 7 PM.
Grape and Colour as Search Anchors
The grape / blend field as free text handles everything from a single-varietal Chablis (100% Chardonnay) to a complex Left Bank Bordeaux blend (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc in proportions you may or may not know precisely). It also handles the cases where you simply wrote "Grenache dominant" because that was all you knew when you bought it at a vineyard gate in the southern Rhône.
Colour as free text rather than a fixed choice accommodates the full range: Red, White, Rosé, Orange, Pétillant Naturel, Champagne, NV Sparkling. Locking it to three choices would have broken the record for anyone with a more varied cellar.
Bought from is the provenance field that determines reorder channel. Berry Bros. & Rudd, Lay & Wheeler, a direct domaine allocation, a supermarket special — each source has a different reorder relationship, a different reliability for stated vintages, and a different minimum purchase. When a bottle you opened last night was the best of its type you have had, knowing where you bought it is the only useful thing in the record.