JB Say What?

Good evening. My name is Glenn and I like wine and I’m a nerd.

In advance of those closest to me arranging for an intervention, I have decided to come clean, so to speak, with my problem.

The sentence leading off this post should not be a surprise to those of you know me. I have not hid my fondness for wine, and, in fact, have blogged about it occasionally here. The fact that I actually blog and have a job that almost defines nerdinesss seals the deal on that end.

(Let me add as further proof that when I found that my my spell checker thought that “nerdiness” wasn’t a word, I decided to look it up on the interweb. I eventually found myself at a web site that linked the following ad with the word in question. So all in all I suppose that if the web site is dynamically associating ad content with searches, I am, as a nerd, in good company.)

But let’s get back on track here. It turns out the perfect marriage of the two prominent traits of mine is an online database called Cellartracker. This web site now carries information on about 11.3 million bottles of wine, and has nearly 70,000 uers, of which I am one. This web site not only allows you to track wines in your cellar, but it also has over 750,000 reviews written by the users. I have been using this for nearly 4 years now, and have found it to be an amazing resource for keeping track of wines that I have in my cellar, wines that I have purchased on futures, as well as wines that I have consumed.

Because the information is stored as a database, you can generate all sorts of reports of varying degrees of interest. For example, you can find out from the consensus “drinking window” which of the wines in your cellar should be consumed before they go bad. You can find out how the price you paid for the wine compares to the average of other users of the site. While this particular feature can be used in a post hoc manner to inflate one’s sense of worth (so I’ve heard), it is particularly useful if you consult it before buying the wine.

But one of the failures of this database is that you actually have to be pretty religious about updating it. Well, technically, you really don’t have be that compulsive about it, unless of course you like wine and are a nerd, which we’ve previously established. Anyway, I tend to be reasonably attentive to managing my cellar, and definitely add wines to the database as I purchase them. What I’m not so good at is deleting the wines from the cellar after they’re removed.

So this weekend I decided to update my database. This entailed printing out the database—for fellow geeks, I will mention that Cellartracker provides a great Excel export feature—and then taking it downstairs and going through each bottle in my collection and comparing it to the list. For most people, this would be just as much fun as you would imagine. I, on the other hand, was completely taken with this task. This ended up as an ultimate fantasy weekend for the wine nerd. I won’t tell you how long it took to do this, but the fact that I now recognize that I have a problem should tell you everything.

When I completed the task, I then spent some time going through the different reports. Here are some random facts:

• I have 795 bottles in my collection, with 43 pending.
• In an odd coincidence, I have consumed 795 bottles in the 4 years that I’ve maintained the database. That means an average of one bottle every other day, which sounds about right.
• I bought 335 bottles for my extended family and friends, and gave 64 away.
• 679 of the bottles are from France, with over half being Rhone wines. I was surprised to find that I have almost as many bottles from Spain as from the USA (<20).

So that is just a small inkling of the terribly fascinating information that is available from this database. Not surprisingly, the overall cost for all the wine purchased and consumed can be accessed, and I suspect that this number might well be of greater interest to the reader. Because certain people with whom I share and house and bank account occasionally read this blog, let me say as previous generations of Rosen men have said in the past:

It’s only pennies a day, dear. Pennies a day.

Posted by Glenn on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 6:28 pm.