Here’s the Magical Cellar of wines that I, one person, own.  How crazy is this?  These – except for a couple of exceptions – are everyday drinkers that are priced a little on the high end..for everyday drinkers, that is.  Most are $25 or less, with a few being a lot more expensive for those special occasions and special moments.  My entire list is housed at CellarTracker.com, a great place and resource for keeping track of wine collections, tastings, and what’s currently popular among wine aficionados.  Feel free to compare what you like with what’s in my collection.  And by all means, be sure to stop by CellarTracker to see what’s happening in the “real” wine world – the world of everyday people enjoying wines.

And for the record, I don’t get paid for this.  Don, Mark, and a few others I know have discovered this wonderful resource and have taken full advantage of what it has to offer.  On a personal note, it’s also saved me lots of time updating Excel spreadsheets!

CellarTracker isn’t just about databasing the wines of a few collectors.  Following is a list excerpted directly from CellarTracker of its features available to subscribers:

Cellar Inventory Management

• Report and search by producer, vintage, varietal, etc.
• Purchase price and valuation data (locale settable)
• Consumption history
• Restaurant-quality printed wine lists
• Per-bottle location & bin tracking
• Personal tasting notes
• Bulk import tools for existing spreadsheets and databases

Tasting Notes

• Record your own notes
• Group a series of notes into tasting events
• Read more than 1 million community tasting notes
• See what others say about wine in your cellar
• Automatic integration with 200,000 professional reviews including Stephen Tanzer‘s IWC,  Jancis Robinson‘s Purple Page Roy Hersh‘s, For The Love of Port, and much more (for co-subscribers)
• Store other professional reviews and scores (in compliance with copyright)
• Community bulletin board

Enjoy my collection and be sure to write me if you have questions about CellarTracker, about the wines that I’m drinking, and why the heck I didn’t do a review!  By the way, I don’t always leave tasting notes.  If the wine is flawed, just not good, I’m feeling lazy, if I’ve already had a wine several times and left notes accordingly and the wine hasn’t changed, or I feel that my palate is “off,” I won’t leave a note.  Which, I think, is actually pretty common among the CT membership.

So enjoy the list, enjoy the site, and be sure to check out CellarTracker as soon as you can!

Related articles by Zemanta

• How To: Make Grape Stories More Like Facebook (wellesleywinepress.com)
• CellarTracker Redesign Set to Launch at Noon Eastern Saturday February 27th (wellesleywinepress.com)
• QA resident declared Wine Person of the Decade! (queenanneview.com)
• this week’s reading… (burgundy-report.com)
• Great wine tasting notes on Cellar Tracker (ourwinestory.com)

All of us enjoy drinking wines that are “highly rated” by the various wine gods and goddesses out there. For most wineries, a Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson, Wine & Food, or other well-known wine rating source is practically a guarantee of a sold-out vintage.

Something you may not know is that wineries submit their wines for ratings. So what? That means that there are many wineries out there that do not submit, and therefore go “unrated” and unrecognized. I’ve learned this over the years from speaking with smaller wineries. They have very limited production that produces just enough for their club members and for limited online sales. Their logic is simple. Why have a wine rated that won’t be easily available for sale? Makes sense to me. When I look at the numbers of cases produced by the wineries – ranging from as little as 25 to as many as 250 – the need for the nod of approval from the big guys is impractical.

Every now and then you may come across a wine that’s really delicious, a good value, or one that you’d like to know more about. No ratings anywhere!! Now what?

How about ratings for the real world? If you haven’t done so yet, you have to go to CellarTracker. It is a website developed by one of the members of the Mark Squires wine forum and has been a great success. It allows members/users to track the contents of their cellars. In addition, it has an area for “community tasting notes”; that is, regular folks like us who have enjoyed the wines that you like and have left their own ratings. People have widely different tastes which accounts for some of the wide ranges of scores, however, many of the wines have incredible consistency from taster to taster and the scores reflect that, as well.

For instance, I looked up the ratings on a Sauvignon Blanc that I’d opened, tasted, and realized that it was pure dreck. It was from a very well-known maker of super high-end reds, but this was more than a shock. I’d paid a bit of a hefty price for the name and was stunned at the poor quality. A quick look on CellarTracker told me that I wasn’t alone. One of the members recommended that this winery stick with its reds. What was interesting is the feeling that people couldn’t believe that *this winemaker* could make something so incredibly mediocre, and the tasters doubted their own palates.

However, it’s not always bad news. I looked up Four Vines Heretic, and saw that the community scores were consistently in the 90’s for this big, beautiful Petit Sirah. So glad that I have several bottles!

The reviews are interesting, and the people are quite frank about their likes and dislikes. They will tell you what foods paired well, other wines at the occasion (if any), and will sometimes even give you the price if they remember. The abilities of the tasters range from relatively novice to winery owners. People’s collections range from less than a dozen to numbering in the thousands. A good mix of wine folks.

Check out CellarTracker and let me know what you think!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Write Off the Vine: Texas Wine News March 29, 2010 – Springtime on Texas Wine Trails Edition (vintagetexas.com)
• Looking Back at 2009 (winecast.net)