Wine Databases

January 19, 2005 2:12 PM

Wine Databases (with barcode support): Does anyone have any experience cataloguing their wine cellar? I have a friend (I wish it were me) with a rather expansive collection of wine and a barcode reader, yet the database that accompanied the reader is quite sparse. Can anyone suggest an alternate, more robust database with barcodes, or another solution out of personal experience? Google returns a mutlitude of dodgy-looking sites making dubious claims. Thanks!
posted by loquax to computers & internet (11 comments total)

I have a fair amount of wine, but I don't catalog it. Not to throw a question back at you, but I've looked into Wine Collector and was wondering if this is the "dodgy" product you're referring to?

Its advantage seemed to be multiplied in that the database is online, so everyone who adds entries will share their work with others.

I was also talking to someone at Total Wine (a large, local wine and spirits chain) about their systems, but I couldn't get much information out of them.
posted by AlexReynolds at 2:25 PM on January 19, 2005

Someone should make a Delicious Wine, heh.
posted by abcde at 2:27 PM on January 19, 2005

Would Delicious Library work for this?

If the Bar Codes are standard, would it not be very very easy?
(maybe even easy to jury-rig it?)

Apologies for adding more questions, but delicious really does seems like an awfully nice method of cataloging (and I just upgraded from a database that I designed myself in filemaker and have been using for many many years)
posted by milovoo at 2:35 PM on January 19, 2005

I think Delicious Library only does books and (some) movies. Does it have a back-end database of wine barcodes to reference?
posted by AlexReynolds at 2:37 PM on January 19, 2005

I believe that it uses amazon for it's lookups, so it might even find wines that are available from amazon ... (although I wasn't thinking specifically enough, because in general you can't mail order wine, so it's unlikely to be in amazon anywhere)
posted by milovoo at 2:53 PM on January 19, 2005

Not to throw a question back at you, but I've looked into Wine Collector and was wondering if this is the "dodgy" product you're referring to?

No actually - that one looks promising but I have no access to user reviews. And aha! An online, updated database, I never noticed that before. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm still a bit hesitant to trust claims at this point - something free that can be tested (like Delicious libraries, I suppose) would be ideal.

How do stores, or for that matter, the LCBO here in Ontario, manage their inventory? Shouldn't there be some kind of master catalogue for manufacturers of these barcode readers to package with their hardware? Or do I very much misunderstand the retail inventory process?
posted by loquax at 3:24 PM on January 19, 2005

I have about 400 bottles in a cellar. I wrote my own custom database to store the wine. Believe me, it sucks. Great for finding a bottle, but a real nuisance when you buy new wine. Type it in, find a bin for the bottle, upload the data. Ugh. And of course the database gets out of sync so you have to do manual inventory.

What's this talk about barcodes? Most wine doesn't have any barcode on it.
posted by Nelson at 3:28 PM on January 19, 2005

All of my "modern" wines have barcodes. I do wonder if they change them each year though. If not, that would be a problem.
posted by smackfu at 3:30 PM on January 19, 2005

Yep, here too - French, Australian, Canadian, even Romanian: all have a barcode, and unique ones for each year (at least in the two cases I have on hand).
posted by loquax at 3:38 PM on January 19, 2005

Huh? Really? Where is the bar code - on the import label, the original label, or an extra sticker? What's it look like? Did your retail store put it there? Where do you buy wine that you get barcodes? What state?

Man, I'd love barcodes. But either I'm blind, or I don't get them on wines I buy in California.
posted by Nelson at 5:34 PM on January 19, 2005

FWIW, the wines I buy in Delaware and Pennsylvania have bar codes. It looks like the importer, not the retailer, places them on the label stuck on the wine bottle. The majority of importers of the French and Italian wines I have on hand seem to be from New Jersey and New York.
posted by AlexReynolds at 5:45 PM on January 19, 2005