Wine is only half the cellar

Almost every cellar app in this category is wine-only. CellarTracker is, Vivino is, InVintory is. That is fine right up until a third of your shelf is single malt, at which point you are keeping two systems: the app for the wine, and a note on your phone for everything else.

There is a reason for the gap. Spirits do not fit wine’s shape. A vintage is often meaningless, the interesting number is an age statement or a bottling year, and the thing that matters is which bottling this is rather than which harvest. Bolting spirits onto a wine schema produces a form with half its fields greyed out.

Spirits get their own vocabulary rather than borrowing wine’s. Type and style, distillery, region, age, ABV, and the bottle size — all filterable, all searchable by distillery or category rather than by producer and grape.

• Category and style. London Dry, Tennessee sour mash, Japanese craft gin, Islay single malt. The distinctions collectors actually sort by.
• Age and ABV. The two numbers that do the work a vintage does for wine.
• Bottle-level tracking. Two of the same bottling are two bottles, each with its own purchase price, place and story.

Reports separate wine and spirits by default, and it is not a cosmetic choice. An average bottle value across a cellar holding both a $40 bourbon and a $400 Burgundy is a number that describes nothing. Value, count, average rating and the breakdown by style each run for wines, for spirits, or for both — your choice, made explicitly.

A whisky collection also behaves differently over time. An opened bottle is a different asset from a sealed one, and neither is really waiting on a drinking window the way a Barolo is. See drinking windows for how that difference plays out.

The spirits live in the same cellar as the wine, on the same map, in the same racks and bins and shelves. A bottle of rye in Shelf 3, slot 6, second back is recorded exactly the way a Sancerre would be, and the same printed drinks menu can list both for guests.

They also share the label scanner and the passport. A dram you had at a bar and will probably never own goes in the passport just like a wine you tried at someone’s table.

If wine-only is the reason you have been putting up with a tool that half fits, this is the difference worth testing first — and the comparison page is blunt about where CellarTracker still wins.

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

• The Passport — Every bottle you've ever tried, remembered.
• Label scanning — Add a bottle from a photo of its label.
• All features — the whole list.