Micava
There is no single right way to do this. What matters is picking a method you will actually keep up with, and recording enough about each bottle that the list answers real questions later. Here are the three approaches most collectors use, what each one is good at, and where each one breaks down.
Once a collection passes forty or fifty bottles, memory stops being reliable. You buy a second case of something you already had. You go looking for a specific bottle and find it three racks away. And, most painfully, a wine you were saving quietly slips past its best window while you were drinking something else.
A good record fixes all three. It tells you what you own, where it is, and which bottles are ready now — which is really the whole point of keeping wine in the first place.
Whichever method you choose, these are the fields worth having. The first six are the minimum; the rest are what turn a list into something you enjoy using.
The two things you will search by most often.
Two wines from the same producer can be years apart in readiness.
Record the full blend, not just the dominant grape — it is what you will filter by when choosing a bottle.
Useful for grouping, and for remembering why you bought it.
A magnum ages differently than a 750 ml, and takes different space.
The number that goes stale fastest. Update it the day you open a bottle.
Which fridge, rack, shelf or box — ideally down to the position.
Roughly when the wine is at its best. This is what stops a good bottle from being forgotten past its peak.
A shop, a trip, or "gift from Paul". Half the pleasure of a collection is the story.
Optional, but handy if you ever want to know what your cellar is worth.
The classic approach, and a perfectly good one to start with. Make a column for each field above, one row per wine, and a quantity column you decrement when you open a bottle. A spreadsheet has real advantages: it is free, it is yours, you can sort and filter it, and there is nothing to learn.
Where it struggles is upkeep. Every bottle means typing the producer, the vintage, the region and the grapes by hand, and every bottle you open means remembering to go back and edit the file. Locations are the weakest part — "rack 2, middle" makes sense the day you write it and much less sense a year later. Most spreadsheet cellars drift out of date not because the owner stopped caring, but because updating them is tedious.
Snap the label, drop it in an album, occasionally add a note. It takes seconds and it is better than nothing — you at least have a visual record of what came through the door.
But a photo album is not searchable in any useful way. You cannot ask it how many Rhône reds you have left, or which bottles are drinking well this year, and it has no idea when you finished something. This works as a stopgap while you decide on a real method, not as the method itself.
A purpose-built app removes most of the friction that kills the other two methods. The good ones let you add a bottle by photographing the label instead of typing, keep locations as an actual map of your storage rather than a text field, track drinking windows so you can see what is ready now, and move a bottle out of your inventory and into a tasting record the moment you open it.
There are several worth looking at, and they are aimed at different people — some at discovery and community ratings, others at large portfolios and auction values, others at everyday personal collections. It is worth reading a comparison of the main wine cellar apps before committing, because switching later means re-entering everything.
Micava is our take on the third method, built for personal collections rather than commercial ones. You add a bottle by photographing the label; it catalogues wines against a structured catalogue of grape varieties, so monovarietals and blends are both recorded properly; you recreate your real fridges and racks on screen and place each bottle where it actually sits; and the dashboard shows drinking windows so you can see which bottles are ready to enjoy now and which ones can wait.
If you want the detail on the inventory side specifically, we go through it on the wine inventory app page.
A spreadsheet you update every week beats an app you abandon after a fortnight. If your collection is small and stable, a well-organised sheet may be all you ever need. If you are adding bottles faster than you are recording them, or you have reached the point of opening three doors to find one wine, that is the signal to move to something built for the job.
If you are ready to stop maintaining a spreadsheet, you can move your collection across and see how it feels. No credit card required.