How to organize a home wine inventory

Start with the question your inventory should answer

A home inventory is useful when you can answer two questions: what do I own, and where is that particular bottle? Begin with a small section of your collection rather than trying to catalogue everything in one sitting. Cellarune is designed for iPhone owners managing a personal collection, including people with roughly 20–200 bottles. You can start with five real bottles and decide whether the workflow fits before expanding.

Record five bottles before designing the shelves

For each physical bottle, record its producer, wine name and vintage when known. Leave an unknown vintage blank rather than guessing. In Cellarune, start from My Wines and use the add control. Manual entry does not require AI permission. Smart Scan can draft details from label photos, but requires sign-in and separate AI permission; review the result before saving.

You can save a bottle without assigning a shelf. That makes the first session about recording what you own. Shelf setup can wait until you have a useful list. Bottles with incomplete identities may appear separately; do not assume similarly named rows represent the same wine.

Separate a wine from its individual bottles

If you own several bottles of one wine, each physical bottle still needs its own location and history. A grouped list is a convenient view, not proof that every bottle is interchangeable. Before editing a position, verify which bottle you selected. Record opened bottles through the app so that the active inventory reflects what is still stored; Memories keeps the opened-bottle history.

Add positions and review the list again

Use names you can match to your storage, such as Main Rack and Reserve Rack. Then assign shelf, row and slot positions. My Wines can switch between List and Map. Search by producer, label or region to check that you can find the records you just added. Try this again within a week, ideally when you actually need to locate or update a bottle.

Drink shows recorded drinking-window status. You can enter windows manually or request an estimate. A window is information to review, not a guarantee of quality, safety or a reason to consume a bottle. Unknown or estimated details should be checked against your own records.

Keep a portable copy and understand the limits

Export your collection as CSV from Settings and keep the backup somewhere you control. Your cellar records remain on your device and in your private iCloud account when iCloud is available; Apple schedules sync, so it may not be immediate. Product analytics is off by default. Free supports 25 active bottles, with opened-bottle history outside that limit. Premium supports unlimited active bottles; check your local App Store for current pricing and AI allowances.