[uncyherb]

Cellar app Review



Do you like wine? Silly question really. I’m not sure I actually know anyone who says no to this question. But that might be partly due to the crowd I hang with.

Got an iPhone? Once again, a dumb question. Everyone’s got one now. If you don’t it’s only because Apple can’t make the little buggers quick enough.

So we’ve established you’ve got, or are getting, an iPhone, and you’re a fan of wine. Nothing odd there. And since we’re talking about nothing being out of the ordinary, you probably don’t know heaps about wine.

You may have taken the “are you a wine tragic” test on http://wineweek.com.au/ and barely moved the needle. That’s cool. It’s a huge secret in the wine industry – but the guys like me who are nuts about the fermented grape juice are actually a pretty small part of the market. A really small part. Like maybe less than 5%. The rest of wine that’s bought is sold to people who just enjoy it, rather than turn into nut-bags with their own websites about the stuff.

But the classic problem for that 95% of the wine buyers out there is remembering what wine you’ve had, and what’s worth buying again. It’s one of the reasons why Joe Public buys the same thing week after week: He’s found something he likes and bugger him if he can remember that wine his mate dragged out 6 months ago when every bottle looks more or less the same to him.

This is where Cellar steps up. Download it onto your iPhone and you’ll never be at a loss to remember any bottle you’ve ever had.



At the start Cellar is a great way to manage a small to medium sized collection of wines at home. But where it really hits its straps is that you can store information on bottles that you no longer have, or even only ever tasted a glass of.

To add any bottle to the Cellar app, you add a few details about it – including bottle shape, colour and so on, plus name, variety and so on. You also get to customise the bottle by using the camera in your phone to snap off a picture of the label, with Cellar automatically wrapping onto the bottle you’ve just made.



Once you’ve added a bottle to the application it is automatically stored in your “Cellar”. It’s a great way of keeping track of what’s under the stairs without having to go moving boxes around to see if that Pinot Noir was a 2004 or 2005.

But possibly the real strength of Cellar right now is what happens when you drink a bottle. Tap on any bottle in your cellar and as well as details on it, you’ll see a little arrow. Touching this allows you to do one of two things. You can throw the bottle away – effectively deleting it from the app. The other option is to send it to the ‘Garage’.



The Garage is a place that store all the wine you’ve had, and keeps a record of them. Polished off a nice Grosset Polish Hill Riesling? Downed a William Downie Pinot with some mates? Chuck into the garage and the next time you’re out shopping for wine you can easily scroll through your past tipples and find the wine you’re looking for. Because you can add notes on each bottle you can include information like who you drank it with to help remind you in case you had a few too many bottle to move from your Cellar to the Garage that night!



Cellar has a lot of things going for it, especially considering it’s just a version 1 release.

But there are some, minor, quibbles I’ve got with it.

The label photos don’t always match up with the cropping box that you use to zoom in the photo you take. It leads to some labels showing too much bottle, which detracts from the ‘realism’ of the way your cellar looks.

Next, the options for details on the bottles are relatively limited. That’s not a particularly bad thing for most people – but it does mean that wines with a ‘name’ (such as Bin389, Grange, Hill of Grace and many more) need to have this ‘name’ entered instead of the grape variety. For most people this wont be a major hassle… but as a bit of a wine wanker, it’s mildly annoying to me.



The selection of bottle colours is limited also. The darkest bottle is a moderately dark green. But it’s nothing like the almost black bottles that the average Aussie shiraz comes in. On bottles, the ‘capsule’ definitely limited to looking like a cork, no screw caps here… which is bit of a shame, but nothing major.

The application is also a bit limited at the moment in regards to being a solution for someone with a very large cellar. There is currently no way to sort wines in the cellar or garage, so you would have to manually scroll through every wine if you’re hoping to find a good match for what you’re eating at the same time . I’m sure a way of searching for keywords, grape variety or year will be added to the application soon… but until this feature, along with the ability to import or export your wines from a spreadsheet is added, the application is really only aimed at people who’ve got less than, say, 100 wines lying around at home. But as I said at the start, that’s most people… just take me and my several hundred bottles out of that equation.

Verdict: Highly Recommended.

[xerodude]

I bought it when it was released. Love it. It's a great way for me to track what we like.

[shoyuweenie]

Great app, few minor niggles as mentioned that will be smoothed out in the future. Cant wait for the update, BURP!

[graemie]

Thanks for the review uncyherb.

1.0.5 is with Apple at the moment, which includes some tweaks such as:

• Choice of camera or gallery for labels (for iPhone users)
• Sound on/off setting
• Cork-only option for bottle tops
• Easy way to drink one bottle at a time if you have more than one
• Performance improvements

And 1.1 is a bigger update with more work under the hood, so it's going to take a bit longer. Planned improvements in 1.1 include sorting of bottles by various criteria, searching, visibility of all bottle notes at once, more bottle customization options and more...

Just to touch on some of the quibbles...

• As you know, wine labels come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so yeah it can be hard to get a label just right with our one-size-fits-all solution in 1.0. Basically we opted for simplicity for this release. What I tend to do for now if I have a rectangular label is 1) make sure I get the logo in and 2) make sure the sides of the bottle line up with the sides of the label (so the photo fills the label area completely), which makes it look more realistic, even if it's not displaying the entire label. So yeah the labeling feature isn't perfect but we'll look into ways of improving it over time.
• Bottle details - we're going to add space for more info here for those who want it. Our theory is that the app should be simple enough for the most casual users to quickly add bottles (hence the only mandatory customization as of 1.0.5 will be bottle colour), but flexible enough for the more enthusiastic wine lovers (which is where more work needs to be done).
• For bottle colours, I tried capturing the most commonly used glass colours for 1.0, but I see your point about dark bottles and a handful of other users have also sent in feedback about that. Longer term, we'll add more colours, but in order to improve things incrementally, in 1.0.5 I've changed the dark colour to be more black and less green.
• Lastly, the sorting/searching thing is coming, and we're still looking into an import/export solution. We don't just want to implement something that will be buggy or unintuitive for some users, so it may take some time to get this feature added. We'd rather take the time to get it working well.

Thanks again for the honest review!

[edit: I just wanted to also mention something about taking photos of the labels... From the screenshots, it looks like maybe you took the photos inside a darkish room? For best exposure and white balance, I take bottles either outside to shoot the labels, or at least near a window to use natural light, and results are best if you try and minimise shadowing at the sides of the label, because curvature shadow is automatically added by the app once the photo is confirmed. I realise this isn't ideal if your cellar is in the basement etc, but if the label image quality is important to you, doing this will help.]

[Lutze]

I think that this review will be what pushes me over the edge and makes me actually BUY my first application for my iPhone!

The only thing better than good wine is finding the same stuff again with less hassle than the last time.

[Exocet]

Great review, uncyherb. I sat my technophobic dad down in front of it and he's considering buying an iPod touch just for this.

[uncyherb]

Originally Posted by Exocet

Great review, uncyherb. I sat my technophobic dad down in front of it and he's considering buying an iPod touch just for this.

Had the same result of another mate... owns a crackberry. Is very tempted to move to iPhone just for this alone.

[graemie]

1.0.5 is approved now and ready for download or update.

[spargo]

v2.0 was released today and it goes a long way to amend everything uncyherb raised above. I got it today and love it!

[graemie]

Originally Posted by spargo

v2.0 was released today and it goes a long way to amend everything uncyherb raised above. I got it today and love it!

Thanks Spargo, yep 2.0 was about addressing the most requested features as well as adding some cool new ones like emailing (and tweeting with a bit of extra effort) and backing up etc.

And now I'm working on some more nice new stuff for the next update.

[forno]

Beer in the pipeline yet graeme???