In praise of Cellar Tracker

The essential website for wine lovers

Joe Fattorini wrote something recently called Scores on Wine Apps are Rubbish. The title is self explanatory: the score on apps like Vivino are of no use at all when it comes to buying a wine. It’s worth reading the whole thing. I’m not taking with Fattorini’s argument but there is one app that I do find incredibly helpful: Cellar Tracker.

I say app but I generally use the website rather than the mobile app. It was founded in 2003, before the word ‘app’ even existed, by an ex-Microsoft man called Eric LeVine - talk about nominative determinism. I’ve been a member since 2012, I think, though I do have older tasting notes. 

When I started using Cellar Tracker, it was basic with the graphics looking very 90s internet (I wish I could find a screengrab of the early days) but it’s now an altogether slicker looking operation. As its name suggests its primary objective is for people with serious collections to keep track of their massive cellars. 

Users with cellars over a certain size have to pay a subscription but the tasting note function which I use it for is free. Since 2012 I have logged over 10,000 notes making me one of the most prolific users of the site though not as much as Ben Christiansen from Wisconsin with over 54,00 notes and counting. Overall there are tens of millions of rating from millions of users all over the world. 

I very rarely score my notes, mainly because they use the 100 point scale that I’m not comfortable with. Most users do score but as per Fattorini’s argument the scores aren’t terribly useful. This isn’t because most people aren’t experienced tasters, by definition if you’re using Cellar Tracker you probably have quite a bit of experience drinking the sort of wines that people who need to keep track of their cellars drink: Barolo, Bordeaux, Burgundy and Napa.

No, the problem is that everyone uses Parker’s famous 100 point scale differently. In the past 85 might have been a good bottle with anything over 90 superlative, that has now gradually crept up and one man’s 86 might be another’s 91. So it’s all essentially meaningless.

The words, however, are useful. Once you get past the jargon, that is. It took me about five years to realise that QPR didn’t mean Queen’s Park Rangers but ‘quality price ratio’. P&P is ‘popped and poured’. I’ve tried adding  my own such as TP, ‘touch pooey’ for certain natural wines or GWR, ‘good with rillettes’ but they haven’t taken off. What it’s really useful for is knowing when a bottle is ready to drink. These are people who have drunk a lot of old and maturing wines, so if you’re wondering whether your Mas de Daumas Gassac 2013 is still in its dumb phase before popping & pouring - Cellar Tracker is the place to go. I opened a bottle last month and it was glorious. Thank you international wine bores for the advice.

You can comment or like people’s tasting notes and you can see how many people have looked at yours. Certain wines ae more popular than others, Barbaresco 2016 from Produttori di Barbaresco is one of the most viewed I’ve ever had. Viña Ardanza from La Rioja Alta is another one that seems to go down well with Cellar Tracker users. Overall, I’d say that most people on the site are fairly conservative. I imagine the average user being a 55 year old man from Chicago called Bill who likes reading Patrick O’Brien. 

There are social functions on the site too which perhaps haven’t been fully exploited. You can make friends with people or become fans of other tasters but when I log on, it doesn’t say what my ‘friends’ are up to. Or if it does it does it’s somewhere where I can’t see.  When I first started getting friend requests I had dreams of being invited to try rare Burgundies in London but it never happened. The only person I’ve ever become slightly friendly with is M. Albert Bouffard aka Englishman’s Claret, a surgeon based on Boston, who not only drinks amazing wine but writes brilliantly too. He’s on Instagram and well worth following.

But to be honest, I really appreciate the purity of the site. Nobody is posturing, nobody is trying to sell you anything, it’s just wine lovers writing about wine. I’ve only had one bit of aggro and that is when I described a Portuguese red as ‘grippy’. 

I don’t know how wine writers of yore managed to keep track of all the wines they tasted. I assume Michael Broadbent must have had a secretary. When I first started trying to keep track of what I had drunk, my wife bought me Moleskine tasting pads which I quickly filled up. Then I attempted to start a spreadsheet which didn't really work. I have the opposite of the Midas touch when it comes to spreadsheets. Whenever I go into one all the columns seem to get jumbled up.

Now I can see in a second what I’ve been drinking and which grape varieties or regions I’m particularly keen on. It has thrown up some surprises. I had no idea I loved chardonnay so much until I looked up the grapes I had been drinking and found it was my number one white grape. At one point over 40% of what I was drinking was French but its now down to 35%, followed by Spain at 10%, Italy and Australia on around 7%, England at 6% and Portugal at 5%. Top three grapes are pinot noir, chardonnay and syrah followed by Bordeaux blends showing what an unadventurous drinker I am.

I used to log everything I drank but now mainly just put things that I like or ones I need to remember whether I’ve drunk or not. Often I will have forgotten that I have tasted something before. I’m always pleased when my notes are similar though occasionally they seem to be talking about an entirely different wine. It’s a good lesson in how hard it can be to judge wine. 

So that’s Cellar Tracker. A bit of technology that is genuinely useful and makes the world a better place. I’d highly recommend joining. Do come and say hello, but please, keep it about wine.