The connected wine cellar

Keeping track of the wines in your cellar is no mean feat, even if you have just a few dozen bottles. Remembering each wine, where it was bought, for what reasons, at what price, and of course where you’ve put it are all easy things to forget and get wrong. Accidentally opening that nice bottle of Pauillac that you originally bought to keep for example.

This often means spending time in the cellar or with the cooler door open, disturbing bottles and trying to recall whether a particular wine is what you’re actually looking for.

We all solve this problem in our own ways, with notebooks, spreadsheets, sticky labels, bottle tags, and all sorts of inventive home solutions.

Now though there’s some great technology to help us easily know everything about our collections.

Caveasy

First up is a French start-up called Caveasy. They have developed a connected and smart wine storage unit which makes recording and then finding your wine a doddle.

To add a new bottle, or multiple bottles of the same wine, you simply take a picture of the label with your smartphone and then place the bottle anywhere on the Caveasy unit. The smart shelves recognise which slot you’ve put the bottle in, and record this to the app.

When you want to find a particular wine you simply press the ‘locate’ button on the app and the smart shelf flashes a light on the slot where that bottle(s) is located.

You can manage up to 588 bottles on the app and smart shelves which come in either 48 or 84 bottle size. The shelves have a built in temperature and humidity sensor which links to the app, meaning you can easily monitor your cellar conditions.

The app also gives you more information about the wine, such as its maturity timeline and recommended food pairings.

One of the nice things about Caveasy is that the company takes a privacy by design approach which means your privacy is considered from the start. They don’t associate your cellar with your name or any other personal details. In fact, you don’t even need to create an account to use the smart shelves and app.

The product is currently in it’s first version with the company taking a very transparent approach and letting everyone see their development roadmap, which is a very nice touch and recognises the early stage this start-up is at.

The 48 bottle ‘Model M’ is priced at €600 while the 84 bottle ‘Model L’ is €952 currently.

I like this company and think they’ve got a great initial product here. As soon as they can integrate this in to a wine cooler I would be very interested in buying one (I’m not lucky enough to have a cellar).

eSommelier

eSommelier is a system that’s been around for some time, since 2003 in fact, and now boasts over 5,000 customers around the world.

This inventory management system consists of a touchscreen computer, barcode scanner and label printer, all kept in a stylish wooden stand.

To record your wine you enter the details on to the system including the storage location, print off a barcode label and stick this to the bottle.

Then when you want to find a bottle again you simply go on to the system to browse or search for a specific wine, see its location and then scan the barcode on the label to record that you’ve removed it.

The system records a whole host of really useful details including ratings, valuations, drinking window, and your own tasting notes.

Unlike Caveasy though eSommelier is quite manual, requiring you to manually enter details rather than just snapping a picture. You also need to have your own location system such as columns and rows in your storage unit.

This is a great system for large collections of hundreds or thousands of bottles. The company even offers a concierge service where they’ll come and catalogue your existing collection for you.

Your collection is easily accessible from anywhere by logging in to the eSommelier site. There’s no smartphone or tablet app though.

The whole system including a year of support is $3995. To keep your system working fully beyond the first year requires another $500 each year which think is a bit cheeky to be honest. We live in a world now where software updates especially should be available for the life of the product.

If you’ve got a large wine collection though eSommelier is a great piece of technology to help you know everything about your wines.

What other great wine storage tech have you come across? Leave a comment with your thoughts.