New Chapter of CellarTracker: Message from the founder

Dear CellarTracker community,

Thank you for being part of the CellarTracker community and our mission to empower people everywhere to discover and experience wines they love.

As we approach the 20th anniversary of CellarTracker’s public release, we are starting an exciting new chapter together.

I started CellarTracker as a hobby and a simple tool for myself and a few friends to manage our cellars and share tasting notes. From day one, I envisioned that the shared wisdom of a passionate community was essential to the product's longevity and utility. For 17 years, I ran the business conservatively with a small team, but it became increasingly clear that CellarTracker deserved significantly more as a product and community. We want to better respond to customer feature suggestions and modernize the product and have evolved from a developer in a coffee shop to a real team.

Our first step in this journey is releasing an entirely re-envisioned mobile application.

Based on feedback from you, we focused on three areas with this initial release: fast and easy cellar management, choosing the best wine for any occasion, and enhanced discovery and sharing of wines. We have been beta testing the app for the last several months – users have told us, “This is so new and modern, I didn’t realize CellarTracker’s been working on something new,” and “Great new design and interface, and glad that it still feels like ‘CellarTracker.’”

With this milestone, we are also modernizing our business model.

CellarTracker has been running on a voluntary payment model with confusing benefits for subscribers. Our community tracks cellars collectively worth $15 billion, and we are the most trusted global resource for managing, choosing, and discovering wine. We are shifting to a traditional subscription model, with clear value for subscribers, to allow the community to thrive today and in the future. Features that help you save time in managing your cellar, provide actionable insights, and simplify choosing a bottle of wine through improved algorithms will be part of a subscription.

We will continue to provide the world’s best free offering for reading and writing community reviews and tracking bottles in your cellar.

We look forward to sharing more details with you soon. I want to take this moment to reiterate that our values remain the same—trust, independence, and the safeguarding of users and your data. The magic of CellarTracker is in the community, and I’m so excited we can start doing more for you.

Sincerely,
-Eric LeVine, Founder/CEO