Vinfolio.com

For the rest of you, this post explains why you should use software:

1. Know what you own, where it is, what you liked –Avoid duplicate purchases, enable drinking or selling wine before it goes bad, locate wine more easily in your cellar, record personal tasting notes, and track pre-arrival purchases from multiple retailers to ensure you receive what you paid for.
2. Access integrated third-party reviews – While some professional reviewers won’t license their reviews, the ability to tap professional scores, reviews, and drink date recommendations in an integrated way from within your chosen cellar management software saves time cross-referencing multiple independent sites and provides a mechanism to keep review content current without manually updating it. This will never be available in Excel. Integrated community tasting notes are also a good source of opinions when organized properly.
   
3. Track cost details and current values – Understanding your cost relative to the current value of a wine may affect what you select to drink, donate or sell (and you ability to document your tax basis). Integrated access to current valuation data also helps you maintain proper insurance coverage on your wine collection.
4. Analyze your collection – The ability to examine your wine collection through reporting and graphs is important for achieving balance or other objectives you have.

Despite the benefits, we still find most new customers come to Vinfolio with no record of what they own and those that do, usually have an outdated Excel spreadsheet. But then most software does not offer the critical integrated data capabilities outlined in points #2 and #3 above. Therefore, the return on investment (ROI) for the personal time needed is still too high to justify the effort for most busy collectors.

Time-saving, convenient features and services can lower the “investment” and raise the “return!”

1. That's why Vinfolio licensed Stephen Tanzer's and Allen Meadow's professional reviews for use in VinCellar.

2. That's why Vinfolio acquired and then converted the Wine Price File from a print-only resource to a primarily online valuation tool integrated into VinCellar.

3. That's why Vinfolio barcodes every bottle purchased from us and adds all details to VinCellar for you automatically

4. That's why we offer on-site inventorying, invoice data entry, and invoice scanning services.

5. That's why we’ve made it easy to use your VinCellar account to select wine to submit for sale through us or arrange physical transfers to or from our storage facility.

Bottom line: There are compelling benefits available for using cellar management software. We’d love you to use our free online VinCellar offering but even competitive products would be better than using nothing.