Move a wine spreadsheet to an iPhone inventory

Keep the spreadsheet until the new inventory is checked

A spreadsheet can be a good source of truth. Moving to an app should preserve that work, not replace your only copy before you have checked the result. Save a dated backup of the original file. Do not delete it after exporting a CSV, and do not email private cellar files to get help with the migration.

Prepare one row for each physical bottle

Cellarune imports each CSV row as one bottle. If your spreadsheet has one row with a quantity of six, prepare six bottle rows rather than expecting a quantity column to create six records. Use a small five-bottle test file first.

For a generic spreadsheet, start with the common columns Producer, Wine, Vintage, Region, Country, Varietal and Type. Wine or Producer must identify each row. Use Gregorian vintage years, plain text names and UTF-8 CSV. Generic matching is best effort: custom columns, notes, prices and shelf positions are not all mapped by that path. Do not assume an arbitrary Excel workbook can be imported directly.

Preview the file in Cellarune

Open Settings from My Wines and choose Import from CSV. Select your file and inspect the detected format, warnings, skipped rows and import plan before confirming. Cellarune supports its own exports and CellarTracker exports as well as best-effort generic CSV. The file limit is 10 MiB and 10,000 data rows.

Free has room for 25 active bottles in total, including those already saved. The import plan may skip active bottles beyond your remaining capacity; Premium allows unlimited active bottles. Check the plan rather than assuming every row will be admitted. Opened history is treated separately.

Check counts, records and positions

After importing the test file, compare the active count with your expected count. Check producer, wine and vintage for all five records. Assign storage positions separately where they have not been imported. Only then prepare the rest of the collection.

Do not import the same file twice as a way to update records: an import adds bottles, and repeated imports can create duplicates. If anything differs, stop, keep the original file and investigate before importing more. Ask support about the column names and warning text without sending your real cellar contents.

Keep exports as a routine backup

Once the inventory is checked, export a fresh Cellarune CSV from Settings and retain it with the original spreadsheet. A CSV is a portable inventory copy, not a full backup of every app asset or photo. It is not proof that iCloud has finished syncing. For a new phone, check iCloud and the actual record counts before removing your old copy.