Recommend software for tracking wine.

October 14, 2004 11:48 AM

Does anyone have any advice on software for tracking wine? I am looking for a personal database kind of thing for my own tasting (the more wines that already exist in it the better) and/or a point of sale inventory tracking system.
posted by Irontom to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

For the "personal database" part of the question, I can only give you a non-recommendation. I used the Wine Enthusiast Guide for PalmOS for about nine months. The "guide" part actually wasn't too bad. Short reviews and ratings of 10,000 or so wines. Not nearly as extensive as I would have liked—I took it shopping with me several times, and found a bottle that I was looking at in the guide more often than not, but still not nearly as often as I would have liked. I was mostly using the guide part to look up specific wines, not doing more complex searches, and it was acceptable for that.

But I ultimately found it lacking in recording the wines I owned and/or had tasted. It's really not up to what a database should be as far as searching capabilities. Not a major problem when there were only 20 or 30 wines in there, but as the number grew, the limited means of searching became more and more problematic. Since I didn't find any other pre-designed wine databases for Palm that had what I was looking for, I just ended up buying a general db program for PalmOS and designing my own custom database.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:47 PM on October 14, 2004