Open Cellar Review
iPhone App
$2.99 Buy now!

Open Cellar Review

Our Review by Ryan Wood on April 13th, 2010
Rating: starstarstarhalfstarblankstar :: WINE CELLAR ORGANIZER
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For those of you with comprehensive Wine Cellars, Open Cellar provides an excellent portable app that allows for easy organization. It's ability to communicate with Windows and Mac versions of the same program, as well as internet backup for free make thi

Developer: Matthieu DUCROCQ
Price: $3.99
Version Reviewed: 2.0

iPhone Integration Rating: starstarstarstarblankstar
User Interface Rating: starstarstarblankstarblankstar
Re-use Value Rating: starstarstarstarblankstar

Overall Rating: starstarstarhalfstarblankstar

I’ll start my review of Open Cellar a little differently than most reviews begin. This app strikes me as something that can be really beneficial to those needing to organize their wine cellars more effectively, want instant access to their collection, or who have another version of this program. I do enjoy a good wine, but I do not own a wine cellar, so my opinions are based completely on observations about a perceived usefulness, and not necessarily based on actual use with my own wine cellar. I know a lot of individuals look to www.148apps.com before making purchases, so I wanted to make this extremely clear.

With all of that out of the way, Open Cellar is a really great app. This app provides an area for organizing wines, providing tasting and purchasing notes, graphical representations of collections, report and statistical analysis of collections, synchronization with the Mac and Windows program of Open Cellar, online resources and free back-up support, and a place to provide feedback to help the developers continue to provide improvements to their collections.

Thankfully, the developer included a demo wine collection of three bottles to give the user an example to base entries off of. This collection is perfect for showing off the impressive bells and whistles of this app. Bringing up the notes page of a specific bottle of wine offers information relating to personal ratings of the bottle, vintage, color, where it’s produced and who it’s produced by, specific attributes, value, a comments section for taste notes, and a whole slew of items specific to the wine connoisseur.

The graphical mode within Open Cellar provides actual bottle images that can be changed specific to the color of wine. Multiple racks can be added, and each rack has a spreadsheet type format to show the exact location of each bottle. Touching a specific bottle shows a summary popup of the bottle of wine, and each identical bottle of wine spins to indicate the location within the rack.

The reporting structure is extremely impressive. Pie chart breakdowns are available by wine or by bottle, and they can be divided to show different categories, wine areas, color, country, producer, bottle size, ranking, and vintage. A global report is also available that gives averages based on total collection and collections specific to the current year.

A few of the most impressive options are the sync and backup options. Mac and Windows both have an Open Cellar program, and by syncing that program with the iDevice the data instantly transfers, rather than forcing the user to reproduce their collection to get it portable. Open Cellar provides a database on the internet, for free mind you, that is available for the backing up of wine cellar information. Data security in case of loss is an extremely important feature, and one that adds a lot of usefulness to this app.

Overall I can only say that if I had a comprehensive wine cellar, or even one with 20+ bottles, I would certainly use this app, if for nothing more than organizational needs. I’ve tried to explain the various attributes this app possesses, but honestly it’s going to take a wine collector specifically to understand if this app is for them. Please leave any questions with me at my email or in the comments section, or contact the developer directly regarding this app.

iPhone Screenshots

(click to enlarge)

Open Cellar screenshot 1 Open Cellar screenshot 2 Open Cellar screenshot 3 Open Cellar screenshot 4 Open Cellar screenshot 5
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