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I am New - 11/25/2017 6:52:17 PM

Wine Lover 99

Posts: 9
Joined: 11/20/2017
Status: offline

Hello, I am Mike and live in central Ohio. Have finally gone to using Cellar Tracker because the collection has grown beyond the means of managing manually.

Being a new user of the software I have a few questions if you don't mind.

1. When using the Ready to Drink feature under each wine icon (red or white) there is a decimal numeric value what is that telling me.

2. I would like to add some subscriptions. Which would give me the most bang for my buck? You might need to know more about mu collection before you can answer this.

Typically most of my collect are wines under $60 a bottle with a few over $100. Whites and reds of just about any variety.

With a subscription I would hope to see some external reviews and possibly some food paring information.

Thanks in advance,

Post #: 1

RE: I am New - 11/25/2017 7:01:55 PM

Slye

Posts: 1922
Joined: 8/3/2013
Status: offline

Welcome to the board and CT! Always nice to welcome a new member.

On the first issue, you might look or post in the cellartracker support.

On the second, I would recommend getting to know some of the different services separate from CT. Figure out which ones are consistent with your palate/interests, and then choose them.

Good luck!

(in reply to Wine Lover 99)

Post #: 2

RE: I am New - 11/25/2017 11:01:32 PM

dsGris

Posts: 4712
Joined: 8/31/2009
From: Portland, OR
Status: offline

Welcome, this is a friendly bunch and eager to help you to buy more wine. Then when the cellar is beyond capacity will commiserate with all kinds of support, having been on the same path.

_____________________________

DennisG
Granpa Wino

(in reply to Slye)

Post #: 3

RE: I am New - 11/26/2017 4:23:39 AM

racerchris

Posts: 1622
Joined: 6/22/2015
From: Bolton, CT
Status: offline

Welcome to CellarTracker.

The drinkability index tells you where in the drinking window your wine is.
A number between zero and one means you have (up to) one bottle within the window.
A number surrounded by parentheses is less than zero.
Its good to enter drinking windows for each of your wines, rather than leave the CT values in place. CT values are the average of all user entered values and may not suit your desires.

One can also select from various algorithms which change the way CT scores drinkability. The default method is linear.
I've noticed that wines with beginning dates I've set in the future seem to have availability numbers based partly on CT and/or professional drinkability dates.

I typically choose bottles with availability values between (.99) and .99.
I may open a bottle with a value beyond negative one - if I expect to buy more or I don't care about spreading my consumption over the full window.

_____________________________

Chris Foley
Searching for very good to excellent, cheap Bordeaux
stainlesswineracks.com

(in reply to dsGris)

Post #: 4

RE: I am New - 11/26/2017 11:20:17 AM

skifree

Posts: 3406
Joined: 3/14/2010
From: SE King County, Washington
Status: offline

Welcome to the forum!

Regarding the subscription question, one of the nice things about both Vinous and Jancis Robinson's Purple Pages are that they are integrated into CellarTracker; their notes on a wine show up under the "pro reviews" tab under a wine's tasting notes.

I personally subscribe to the Wine Advocate, though that was in large part because of Neal Martin's reviews of Bordeaux. He recently joined Vinous.

Jeff Leve also posts his tasting notes in the regular area of CellarTracker. His site is interesting, and much of it is free I believe. https://www.thewinecellarinsider.com/

_____________________________

So much wine, so little time

(in reply to racerchris)

Post #: 5

RE: I am New - 11/26/2017 12:50:53 PM

Jenise

Posts: 1315
Joined: 3/20/2013
From: The Pacific Northest Westest
Status: offline

Welcome, Mike!

Re subscriptions, I think it depends less on price than on whether your collection/interests lean more Old or New World. That said, for the best balanced coverage of both? I'd go Vinuous.

(in reply to skifree)

Post #: 6

RE: I am New - 11/28/2017 6:47:01 AM

Anthonyiez

Posts: 147
Joined: 8/28/2017
Status: offline

Welcome!

Wish I could help more. Even though I've had CT since the very beginning, I'm still not very good with it. Good luck and enjoy!!!

(in reply to Jenise)

Post #: 7

RE: I am New - 11/28/2017 6:55:11 AM

CranBurgundy

Posts: 8272
Joined: 1/5/2016
From: Philly / South Joizey
Status: offline

Hi there Mike!

Fair warning:

Hold on to your wallet around this bunch of enablers, and brush up on 80's movie quotes.

_____________________________

Purple Drankin' Cretin.

Vote NO on Proposition S1ct1516 "BAN the CRAN!" this Election Day.

“Let it be recorded: henceforth, December 15 shall be known as 'The Day of Dennis'.” - Prof. Ken "KPB" Birman, 12/17/23

(in reply to Anthonyiez)

Post #: 8

RE: I am New - 11/28/2017 8:01:06 AM

KPB

Posts: 4648
Joined: 11/25/2012
From: Ithaca, New York
Status: offline

The only subscription I've kept is Vinous Media, and that's the one I would definitely recommend. The reviews are very high quality, they have a good discussion board (that I no longer post on, but I actually do keep an eye on it even so), and you can email or post to ask their reviewers questions -- you'll get answers quickly. CT links to it, and when you look at your wines you'll see the VM reviews integrated with your cellar list.

I don't know how much cred to put in the "time to drink up" number. They just take your window, take your bottles, and space them out evenly. So for example if the window runs from [2016-2020] and you have 5 bottles, they would compute that you should drink one each year, 2016, 17, 18, 19 and 2020. Then there would be 2 ready to drink right now, of the 5. But they do it with exact dates and might use a number like 1.73.

Hope this made sense. But as a rule for drinking things, what it comes to is that the drinking window matters. And the window is either an average of what people have typed in, based on their own guesses, or your personal guess. If you put one of your own in, it always overrides and that's what you would see, not the average. So 2016-2020 above would either be what you said it should be, or if you said nothing, an average of what others said (including the professionals but not counting their windows as better quality estimates or anything special like that).

So how good are these estimates? I would say that CT scoring is wildly crazy, from the community, and the windows are insanely far from correct. Crazy because let's be honest: If Sally opens a winery and her mom, dad and extended family all get cases of her wine, CT might end up with a lot of 100pt scores from them, and reviews that make no sense at all. You can get scores of 100 from Mom and 85 from Josh Raynolds (or me). Happens a lot. Plus since CT is open to anyone, it does attract lots of people who have peculiar taste in wine. The world is a big place. Some people really like wine mixed with Coca-Cola... did you know that? Just saying.

So most of us learn to focus on a few reviewers who seem to drink what we drink and seem to enter TNs that make sense to us. We use the "fan" system to track them (CT displays a gold star). Then we kind of ignore Mom's 100pt TNs for Sally's Syrah.

The issue being: with drinking windows, we can't ignore those. So if you trust CT windows, you risk having Mom also put in that Sally's wine will be best from 2025 to 2125. Caveat emptor!

< Message edited by KPB -- 11/28/2017 8:02:15 AM >

_____________________________

Ken Birman
The Professor of Brettology

(in reply to CranBurgundy)

Post #: 9

RE: I am New - 11/28/2017 6:34:53 PM

khmark7

Posts: 11412
Joined: 7/6/2008
From: Chicago suburbs
Status: offline

I am patiently waiting for the "I am old" thread.

_____________________________

"a rogue Provence rouge of unknown provenance." author grafstrb

(in reply to KPB)

Post #: 10

RE: I am New - 11/28/2017 6:54:34 PM

Smaragd

Posts: 718
Joined: 2/3/2017
From: New York City
Status: offline

quote:

ORIGINAL: khmark7

I am patiently waiting for the "I am old" thread.

If you, too, are old... don't wait too long!

(in reply to khmark7)

Post #: 11

RE: I am New - 11/29/2017 4:08:18 AM

musedir

Posts: 23486
Joined: 2/25/2010
From: At 2534ft in Asheville near Royal Pines
Status: offline

“Brush up on 80s movies”... what happened to the 60s and 70s?

_____________________________

"Fan the sinnking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine." Charles Dickens.

(in reply to Smaragd)

Post #: 12

RE: I am New - 11/29/2017 7:55:13 AM

lockestep

Posts: 1964
Joined: 2/12/2012
From: Unionville, PA
Status: offline

Ken's response above is an excellent summation. I will just add a note for drinking windows - if you click on one of your wines, at the top of the right hand column you will see a photo of the bottle and a link to the wine. Click it.
Then note the 'Drink between" listing at the top of the page - the dates are highlighted in blue to indicate it is a link,click it again.
Now you see the source of the window. Any pro reviews are given priority, but lacking a subscription to them (or lacking a review from one of the partially free guys) the system will work down to community window as a last resort.
You can also edit your dates here, or add in pro review dates you don't have linked to CT (if you are Vinous app subscriber, for example, you are not linked and have to manually enter).
Welcome aboard.

_____________________________

My Wine of the Month (2/24)
2016 Vincent Pinot Noir Bjornson Vineyard

(in reply to musedir)

Post #: 13

RE: I am New - 11/29/2017 8:20:38 AM

fingers

Posts: 8242
Joined: 8/26/2006
From: Santa Ana, CA
Status: offline

Want to update multiple drink dates in your cellar? Click on the Quick Links dropdown, select Ready to Drink, toggle the view by clicking on Bulk Update Drinking Windows. You then get to see the subscribed pros, the CT Community avg, and your personal values all at once.
Very convenient.

(in reply to lockestep)

Post #: 14

RE: I am New - 11/29/2017 10:22:31 AM

racerchris

Posts: 1622
Joined: 6/22/2015
From: Bolton, CT
Status: offline

Another thing I like to do with the Ready to Drink page is look into the future by setting the Drinkability Date.
It's the last option in the Narrow Results menu. Looking ahead a month or three reveals bottles that will be ready soon.

_____________________________

Chris Foley
Searching for very good to excellent, cheap Bordeaux
stainlesswineracks.com

(in reply to fingers)

Post #: 15