Ambitious with lots of room for improvement.

The application promises a great deal but is marred by some obvious and quite annoying flaws.

The first thing users will notice when using this software is that you can include a GREAT deal of detail about a given bottle of wine (or whiskey, beer, etc.). Anything from the most critical bits of information such as varietal, vintage, and apogee to minutia and very thoughtful touches such as bottle shape and color, a URL to reviews or producers, serving temp, decanting time, food pairings. Just about anything you would want to include in terms of information regarding a bottle can be included. Theres even a snazzy feature that lets you search for label art from the internet to stick onto the bottle.

The DRAWBACK of all this is that it takes an obscene amount of time to collect and enter. The learning curve is somewhat steep. It took my girlfriend and me quite a few hours to enter what we consider the basic information for our collection. BOTTOM LINE, roughly 2-4 hrs to enter basic information for 100+ different kinds of wines and 200+ bottles, with more work yet to be done. If you are going to use this software be prepared to set aside a lot of time if you wish to be meticulous.

I dont expect the application to autopopulate all the information weve taken the time to enter, although it would be a nice feature it is something we signed up for. So I dont want to be hypercritical here.

FLAW. Inability to adjust storage locations. There does not seem to be a way to drag or rearrange the different storage places. In fact the order in which you create them seems to be the order they exist. So if you suddenly buy a new wine fridge, you wont be able to arrange it so that the the wine fridges are adjacent to each other in the storage location list.

FLAW. Pricing and bottle referencing. Vinoteka includes information on a bottle of wine generally speaking (think a 2007 Napa cab you have from a particular vineyard) as well as information on a specific bottle of wine (think the 2007 Napa cab you have from that vineyard that is sitting in the winefridge on the 3rd shelf as opposed to the one in your cellar). Information regarding price changes for the bottles generally are not reflected in prices of individual bottles. I understand why that might be the case if you are talking about purchase price. But market price and other kinds of price should carry through. The downside is if you hastily enter a bunch of wines into a wine fridge without including the price you have to go back and redo the pricing for wines twice.

AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT. It would be nice to be able to copy and paste entire bottles of wine so that only some changes would need to be made instead of having to copy them line by line as well as the ability to compare two references (thats bottles of wine) side by side.

Presently, the application shows a great deal of promise and you get a lot out of it if you put a lot into it. But it seems to be inefficient at times. This seems to be an application for those who value their wine more than their time. I get more efficiency and probably just as much utility out of managing my collection on a spreadsheet, but its not as pretty.

I believe the day will come (I just hope sooner rather than later) that this application will be worthy of 5 stars. But in the meantime, a few improvements in the search and user interface will easily nab a 4th star.

TLDR: Pretty good application with lets you enter a lot of detail about your wine collection, but requires a great deal of time. Lots of room for improvement. Decent right now, but might be the gold standard for all similar applications in the future.

duelingholophonors about Vinoteka