Expert consultation on buying, storing, serving and tasting wine and wine cellar management. Buying, drinking and collecting wine is more popular than ever. Regardless of your budget, there are lots of delicious wines out there.
I remember magazine ads for computers back in the early days of the PC. Invariably, one of the apps in many ads was a digital recipe, as if we’d lug an IBM PC into a kitchen and use a recipe app instead of a cookbook or index card.
Times have changed. Whatever you want to do, Mac or iPhone, there’s an app for that. My latest love is Vinoteka, a full on and fully fun wine cellar management app for your Mac.
The Digital Wine Cellar
There are three ways to use Vinoteka to manage your wine collection. #1 – Totally virtual because you don’t have a wine cellar or any bottles of wine.
Or, #2 – you have a modest collection of wine and you’d like to better manage your bottles, tastings, and food pairings.
Or, #3 – you really have a wine cellar and it’s obvious that letting your Mac keep track of your bottles is better than trying to remember where it all went, how much it cost, and what it tastes like.
I like wine. No, that’s not right. In the interests of full disclosure, and in case there are any sunshine laws I may violate, I can truthfully say, I love wine. Dining, dancing and vino. Not necessarily in that order, of course.
Vinoteka is a wine cellar management app worthy of a try out even if you don’t have a cellar (we live in a condo and the best we could do was a ceiling skylight—which really ticked off the people living above us).
How do you manage bottles on your Mac? The basics. References. Tastings. Food Paring. Cellar. Bottles.
Manage References
Vinoteka lets you add detail about different wines. Name, country, notes, category, bottle shape, labels. All the basic information about any particular bottle of wine gets stored in the References section.
Vinoteka features a life like look at wine on a shelf. All your detail goes here, bottle by bottle. It’s all searchable, sortable, and tagable.
As your wine collection grows, you’ll find it easy to select a particular bottle for a specific occasion.
Manage Tasting Notes
Wine is all about taste. Vinoteka takes the digital approach for Mac users. Enter your tasting notes into Vinoteka, and provides different tasting methods for your wine tasting occasions.
How? Check out the slick and sassy interface. Select a wine bottle, add information in the notes, and save.
Tasting notes come in handy during a wine tasting. Gather notes from your friends and family. Vinoteka lets you share tasting notes, too.
Manage Wine & Food Paring
I struggle with food pairings, so this module was a good experience for me. Amazingly, some wines go better with some foods, so they need to be matched appropriately.
Somewhere in there is an arbitrary list of rules, the do’s and don’ts of wine and food.
I tend to like what I like, rules be damned, but Vinoteka allows for my rules variations.
Cellars, Bottles, And Racks, Oh My!
Here comes the fun part. How many wine lovers do you know that have multiple wine cellars? Well, you can have as many as you need using your Mac.
Organizing is all about cellars, bottles and racks. And history.
Yes, dear friends of the vine, Vinoteka also tracks your wine history. Create a digital cellar (hopefully, it represents your real cellar), add bottles and racks. Then, dig into the historical information.
Keep track of which bottles go in, which go out, and where they are, including a history of each wine. Bottles can also be managed in digital racks that mirror your own cellar.
![Wine Wine](http://a3.mzstatic.com/us/r30/Purple3/v4/b5/c4/d2/b5c4d25b-84ee-a187-b069-12c62719cfc3/screen480x480.jpeg)
Vinoteka acts as a wine gatekeeper (as long as you’re manning the lock on the gate), too. It’s perfect for tracking what you bought, where you bought it, what it costs, and what it might be worth.
Customization is the rule. As you expand your cellar, by adding bottles and racks, you can choose from among different types of racks—wood or metal.
Vinoteka is almost self explanatory. The only thing you’ll find missing is a quick education on the finer points of wine and collecting.
First and foremost, Vinoteka manages your wine collection, tracks details for each bottle, organizes them appropriately in cellars and racks, and is actually fun to use. Whether you’ve had a few glasses of wine or not.