More Virtual: WineLog.net

Yet another digital wine cellar. Definitely the up and coming thing these days, eh? I’ve already discussed CellarTracker, WineFetch, Logabottle, and Cork’d in previous posts.  Now, Winelog.net.

CellarTracker is the grand-daddy of them all. It easily exports your cellar into an incredibly detailed Excel spreadsheet. The question is, can any of the digital wine cellars import that spreadsheet into their database? Well, not so far. However, WineLog.net asked me to forward them the spreadsheet and they would see what they could do. It’s the best response I’ve had yet.

WineLog has a Web 2.0-ish interface. It’s clean and easy to use. It is missing the ability to generate reports and any sort of plausible help file or forum. They do have a responsive blog and the ability to generate RSS feeds, tags, and tag clouds. They are also doing pretty well at generating a community.

In fact, WineLog did some magic marketing and were featured on the
front page of Digg, as well as several techie sites. I think they got
deluged. The advantage of the deluge? Their database is growing, which
means less painstaking entry for the rest of us.
As I mentioned
when I talked about Corkd.com, I think the use of tags is a really
great idea. I also like the idea of an RSS feed to follow other
people’s comments on a wine of interest. You can SMS your phone with
Wine information, but I haven’t figured out the uses for this yet. I’m
also not sure if there is a WAP site available, making WineLog useful
when I’m wandering aimlessly in a wine store because I can’t remember
the vintage I need.
They are definitely lacking in documentation. (Hire
me!) Maybe I need to start soliciting these little wine tech companies
and seeing if they are willing to pay for a tech writer. Many of them
really seem to need one.
I think WineLog is the best of the bunch so
far. These things seem to pop up weekly, though, so who knows how long
that will last. I am looking forward to seeing what they do with my
CellarTracker-generated spreadsheet of a couple hundred bottles and
tasting notes.

Technorati Tags: online wine cellar, winelog

3 Responses to “More Virtual: WineLog.net”

1. Jason Coleman says:

   June 6, 2006 at 2:09 pm

   Hi, Michelle. Thanks for the kind words for WineLog.
   We were blown away by the spreadsheet that you sent us. Wine Cellar seems very thorough. I wanted you to know that I added the wines which are on the first tab of that spreadsheet. You can see them using this link (search for “from_michelle”):
   http://www.winelog.net/wines/?term=from_michelle
   We’re working on a way to import your tasting notes, and taking notes along the way to possibly make this automatic in the future. It’s a difficult task though since most tools don’t use a universal identifier and only have partial UPC data.
   I will be off from work later next week and doing more work on the site. I may try to get a hold of you then. We’re tempted by your offer to help out. Maybe we can find some money for it. Keep in touch.
2. MalB says:

   June 8, 2006 at 4:40 am

   I have developed my own spreadsheet that can search on any parameters (eg winery, label, region, variety, vintage, location etc)and any subset of these. It also gives totals and subtotals etc of no. of bottles, cost, market value.
   However a few friends have told me about the Reg Bigot who has developed something that uses MS Access. You can check out a free copy from him at http://users.tpg.com.au/handreck/
   I haven’t had time to evaluate it myself but I have heard good things.
3. Eric LeVine says:

   June 10, 2006 at 7:47 pm

   Thanks for the mention of CellarTracker. Please note that we do in fact have a bulk import interface (and have for about 7 months now) as described here: http://www.cellartracker.com/bulkfaq.asp
   For the moment this is focused on letting people pull in their inventory from other software, and people have used it to load 250,000 of the 2.7 million bottles tracked on CellarTracker. At some point we may extend this to allow similar import of personal tasting notes, as a number of people with many thousands of notes have approached us about this.

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