A column on drinking windows, storage, and the art of knowing when.
By Carson Smith · WSET-3 · 450-bottle cellar
There is a moment, somewhere between the day you buy a serious bottle and the night you finally open it, when you stop thinking about price and start thinking about timing.
Cellared was built for that moment. Not the buying. Not the storing. The opening: the decision that has no good market signal. A 95-point score from 2018 tells you nothing about whether to drink the bottle tonight or in 2030.
Ridge Vineyards
Monte Bello
Santa Cruz Mountains
2018
The Cellared Wine Library
Drinking windows, tasting notes, and cellaring guidance for collectible wines. Browse, or search a specific bottle.
Six tools that replace the spreadsheet, the guesswork, and the generic wine app.
Optimal drinking windows from a 10-factor ageability index. Get notified when bottles peak.
Ask what to open tonight and get specific recommendations from your collection. Bottles you own, in their ideal window.
Point your camera at a bottle, restaurant menu, or shop shelf. Get instant tasting notes, food pairings, and buying advice tuned to your cellar and palate.
Four taps, ten seconds, three curated picks. For nights when you want something good without overthinking.
Tell Cellared what you're cooking. It recommends the best match from your cellar. Cuisine types, specific dishes, or vibes.
Regional breakdown, varietal distribution, vintage spread, consumption patterns, and cellar valuation. Your story, visualized.
The screens you live in: a daily pour, a sommelier that reads your whole cellar before it answers, and the collection itself.
Tell it the occasion. It ranks what to open from the bottles you already own.
Open to one bottle that's ready tonight, not a spreadsheet of six hundred.
Search, filter, and read every bottle's drinking window at a glance.
Import from a spreadsheet, search our wine database, or add manually. Cellared fills in the details automatically.
Cellared calculates drinking windows, builds taste profiles, and maps your collection across varietals, regions, and vintages.
Ask the sommelier, run Quick Pick, or browse alerts for bottles entering their peak. Never miss a window again.
Region by region, vintage by vintage. Use the library to research a bottle before you buy it, or to know when to open one you already own.
Start free, upgrade to Pro in the app.
Start free, upgrade to Collector in the app.
A wine collector, WSET-3, who got tired of spreadsheets and generic apps that couldn't tell him when to open his best bottles. So he built Cellared.
Cellared is a new iOS app, launched May 1, 2026. It is a different product from the older, similarly named wine tools. Read the founder story at /about.
Free with unlimited bottles, no credit card. Pro is $7.99 per month or $79 per year. Collector is $15.99 per month or $149 per year. You can run the entire app on the free tier indefinitely; the paid tiers add cellar-aware sommelier reasoning, calibrated drinking windows, and reporting.
Yes. Export a CSV from CellarTracker, drop it into Cellared, and your full collection lands in about three minutes. Tasting notes, vintages, and quantities all carry over. Cellared deduplicates against any bottles you have already added so you can re-import safely.
Every bottle gets a drinking window calculated from a 10-factor index that accounts for structure, vintage character, producer style, and storage conditions. The window has four points: window open, peak start, peak end, and hard decline. We show the shape, not just a midpoint, so you know whether a bottle is climbing, holding, or sliding.
Yes at launch. Native iOS, designed for one-handed use while you are looking at racks. Android is on the roadmap; you can leave your email on the homepage to get notified when it ships.
No. Download the app, add bottles, and use the full free tier with no card. You can decide whether the paid features are worth it after you have lived with the app for a few weeks.
CellarTracker is the deep web app and community database, twenty years in the making. Cellared is mobile-first with calculated drinking windows on every bottle and a sommelier that reads your full cellar before answering. Vivino is built for discovery and ratings. Cellared is built for managing the wines you already own. We have head-to-head pages at /vs/cellartracker, /vs/vivino, and /vs/invintory.
Your data stays. You drop back to the free tier with unlimited bottles. The features that require a paid tier (cellar-aware sommelier, calibrated palate, monthly reports) turn off; everything else keeps working.
Free. Unlimited bottles. No credit card.