Open the right bottle tonight

It is not buying the wrong bottle. It is buying the right one and finding it eight years later, past its best, behind something else.

That failure is quiet. Nothing tells you it is happening, because the bottle sitting too long looks exactly like the bottle ageing nicely. A cellar that knows its windows can say so before the fact rather than after you have opened it.

The cellar surfaces what is currently in its window, with each bottle’s location attached — so “open this tonight” comes with the shelf to walk to rather than a hunt. It is the first thing on the home screen, because it is the reason the app gets opened on a Friday.

Windows arrive with the bottle. A wine added by scanning its label comes with a drink-from and drink-to already estimated, so a new case is useful immediately instead of after an evening of research. Where you know better than the estimate, override it — your number wins and stays won.

Three sources, in increasing order of authority, and the app is explicit about which one a bottle is using.

• An estimate, produced when the bottle is identified from its label. Based on the wine’s type, region and vintage. Good enough to be useful on day one, and never presented as more certain than it is.
• The producer’s own guidance, where you have it — from the back label, the tech sheet, or the merchant.
• Yours. If you have drunk three bottles from the case and think it needs another four years, that judgement beats any estimate. Override it and the override sticks.

A bottle with no window is left with no window rather than given a made-up one. It simply does not appear in the ready-to-drink list, which is the honest behaviour: a wrong window is worse than none, because it invites you to open something early on false confidence.

The same data answers slower questions. What is opening up over the next year. What is at the far end of its window and should be drunk rather than saved for an occasion that may not come. Which parts of the cellar are stacked up in the same few years, which is how people discover they have twenty bottles all peaking at once.

Reports carry it as a shape rather than a list, alongside value and rating, so the drinking plan and the collection view are the same view.

Spirits mostly do not age in the bottle, and pretending otherwise would be a feature working against the truth. A sealed bourbon is not waiting for anything, so it does not clutter the ready-to-drink list with a window it never had. See spirits tracking for how that half of the cellar is handled instead.

When a bottle does get opened, it can leave a mark in the passport on the way out — the count goes down and the memory goes in, in one step.

Fourteen days free, no card. One plan with everything in it, afterwards — $12.99 a month or $119.99 a year.

Begin — 14 days free

• Spirits — Whisky, bourbon and everything else you keep.
• The Passport — Every bottle you've ever tried, remembered.
• All features — the whole list.