Getting started with CellarLog.

Everything you need to go from empty app to fully cataloged cellar — scanning bottles, setting quantities, mapping racks, and letting the drinking windows tell you what to pour tonight. Fifteen minutes of reading, a lifetime of pouring at peak.

1 · Add your first bottle

Tap the big + button on the Cellar tab. You have three ways in:

1. Scan the label. Point the camera at the front label. Our AI identifies the wine and fills in everything — region, grapes, drinking window, tasting notes, critic scores, even an estimated market price. Review the result, adjust anything, and save.
2. Scan the barcode. If the bottle has a UPC, the barcode scanner is the fastest path — and if another CellarLog user has scanned that exact wine before, it comes back instantly from the shared cache without using a scan credit.
3. Add manually. Tap Add Bottle Manually and type as much or as little as you like. Only a name is required; everything else can come later.

2 · Quantities & consuming bottles

Every wine tracks how many bottles you hold. To change it: open the wine, tap the pencil in the top-right, and scroll to Purchase Details — the Quantity stepper lives there. Set it to 6 and the cellar summary up top follows immediately.

When you drink a bottle, use Mark as Consumed on the wine's detail page. Quantity drops by one, and the last bottle moves the wine to your consumed history — it keeps its tasting notes and ratings but bows out of your inventory counts. Wishlist wines work the same way in reverse: mark them purchased when you buy, and they join the cellar proper.

3 · Cataloging your whole cellar

Doing a full inventory? Two routes, and they combine well:

1. Scan as you go. Work rack by rack: scan a label, set the quantity in the confirmation screen, save, next bottle. The 100-scan pack is built for exactly this session. Duplicate detection catches the second bottle of the same wine and offers to bump quantity instead of creating a twin entry.
2. Import a spreadsheet. Already keeping your cellar in Excel, CellarTracker, or another app? Export it as CSV and use Settings → Import. CellarLog matches columns automatically, previews every row as NEW, UPDATE, or UNCHANGED before anything is written, and shows a field-by-field diff for updates. Quantities, prices, tasting notes, and critic ratings all come along.

4 · The cellar map — where every bottle lives

CellarLog maps your cellar visually, on photos of your actual racks, instead of abstract bin codes.

1. Go to Settings → Cellar Map and add a location — your rack, wine fridge, or cellar wall.
2. Photograph the rack, then mark the slot positions on the photo. Grids, diamonds, and single rows are all supported.
3. Open any wine, tap the pencil, and assign each bottle to a slot — six bottles can live in six different spots across different racks.

From then on the map shows your whole collection in place, color-coded by drinking window. Tap a bottle on the photo to jump to it. Lost track of something? The scan-to-find camera on the Cellar tab identifies a bottle in hand and jumps straight to its entry — and its slot.

5 · Drinking windows — pour at peak

Every AI-scanned wine gets a drinking window: the years it's ready, when it peaks, and when it's fading. Your cellar list can sort and group by window status, the Ready count sits at the top of the Cellar tab, and "What should I open?" separates Drink tonight (at peak) from Clear out the cellar (past peak, drink soon). Turn on notifications and CellarLog tells you when a bottle enters its window — that's the whole point of the app in one sentence.

Windows are editable: pencil → drinking window fields, for when you disagree with the critics — or your cellar runs warmer than theirs.

6 · Tasting notes & critic scores

Open a wine and tap Add your notes. Each note carries a date, star rating, structured aroma/palate/finish tags, food pairings, the occasion, and whether you'd buy it again. A wine collects notes over time — a vertical of your own opinions.

Paste a critic's review into a note and CellarLog spots embedded scores ("93 Points — Wine Advocate") and offers to file them as critic ratings on the wine, with the prose kept in your note. Critic ratings are also editable directly — long-press the critic card on the wine's detail page.

7 · CSV import, export & backup

Settings → Export produces a spreadsheet-ready CSV of your entire cellar — quantities, prices, market values, tasting notes, critic ratings, blend percentages, racks, everything. Edit it in Excel and re-import it: the preview shows exactly what changes before you commit, tasting notes merge additively (device notes are never deleted), and a stable Short ID per wine means re-imports never create duplicates.

Settings → Backup makes a complete archive — photos included — for belt-and-suspenders alongside iCloud sync. Your cellar syncs across iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch through your personal iCloud; there's no CellarLog account and your data never lives on our servers.

8 · NFC tags & label printing

Stick an NFC tag on a bottle or shelf, write it from the wine's detail page, and a phone-tap opens that wine forever after. With a Niimbot Bluetooth label printer, CellarLog prints neck and shelf labels with QR codes directly from the app — scan the code with any camera to pull up the bottle.

9 · Apple Watch & widgets

The Watch app is fully standalone: browse your cellar by color, check your wishlist at the wine shop, see what's at peak tonight, and dictate a tasting note right at the table. Complications put your ready-to-drink count on the watch face. On iPhone, widgets offer a rotating featured bottle, a what-to-drink-today list, and a cellar-colors chart.

10 · Power-user touches

Questions this guide doesn't answer? Email support — you'll get a reply from the person who wrote the code.

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Guide reflects CellarLog 1.36. Pour at peak.