The bottles you loved, remembered

Plenty of apps let you record what you drank. Untappd built a whole social network on the check-in, Vivino keeps every label you have ever scanned, and both do it well. So the claim here is not that nobody remembers bottles for you.

The claim is narrower and, I think, more useful: this is the tasting journal from an app that also takes your cellar seriously. A scan history is a shopping funnel — it exists to sell you the next bottle. A check-in feed is a conversation. The passport is an archive, and it sits next to the inventory rather than instead of it.

This is the part most cellar tools get wrong by omission. The wine you had at a restaurant in March is not in your cellar and never will be, so an inventory has no row for it — but it is exactly the bottle you want to remember when you see the label in a shop nine months later.

A passport stamp is not a bottle. It has no location, it does not count towards your total, and it does not appear in your drinking windows. It holds what actually matters afterwards: the wine, the date, where you were, what you thought, and whether you want to buy it.

Bottles you do own get a stamp too, at the moment you pour them. The cellar count goes down and the memory goes in, in one step.

• The bottle. Producer, vintage, region — linked to the wine record where one exists, so editing the wine updates the memory too rather than leaving two versions of the truth.
• The occasion. Where you were and who with. A dinner party reads differently from a Tuesday.
• How it went. Your own words. Mood tags for the register, and room for the sentence you will actually want back.
• Whether to buy it. A wishlist flag, because “that one was very good” is useless without a way to find it again.

Stamps carry their region, so the passport also draws an atlas: the places your drinking has actually taken you, as opposed to the places you assume it has. It is the part people show other people, and it tends to be the thing that reveals a rut.

Spirits get the same treatment as wine here — see spirits tracking — and a bottle added by scanning its label arrives with the producer and region already filled in.

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

• Label scanning — Add a bottle from a photo of its label.
• The cellar map — Racks, bins, and every bottle in its place.
• All features — the whole list.