Your cellar, without a signal

In short: Cellarion now works in the cellar itself. With offline mode on, the app keeps a copy of your cellars, racks and bottles on your phone, works from it when there is no signal, and sends what you changed as soon as you are back online. It is on by default in the installed app, and a switch in Settings → Offline mode in a browser.

The cellar was the one place the app didn't work

A wine cellar tends to be a basement, a garage, a thick-walled room at the back of the house — somewhere that is good for wine and bad for a phone signal. It is also exactly where you reach for Cellarion: standing in front of the racks, wondering where that 2016 went, or taking a bottle out for dinner.

Until now that meant a spinning wheel, or an error, at the worst possible moment. Offline mode fixes that. Cellarion keeps a copy of your cellar on your phone, works from it when the network doesn't answer, and catches up by itself when you're back upstairs.

What works without a connection

With offline mode on, you can open the app with no signal at all — even after closing it — and:

• Browse your cellars, including cellars other people share with you, and search and filter your bottles.
• Find a bottle in its rack, and open its page with the details you saved.
• Take bottles out: mark a bottle as drunk, open it, or pour a glass.
• Rearrange: place a bottle in a rack, move it to another slot, or take it out.
• Edit your notes and rating.

A banner at the top tells you when you're working from the saved copy, and when it was saved. Anything you change offline shows straight away, and the banner counts the changes waiting to be sent.

Things that genuinely need the internet — searching the shared wine registry, adding a new wine, statistics, the community, the AI features — show a short "you're offline" note instead, and load by themselves the moment the connection returns.

When the signal comes back

Your changes are sent automatically, in the order you made them, as soon as the phone has a connection again. Nothing for you to do.

Two things we were careful about:

• Nothing is applied twice. In a basement the usual problem isn't "no network" but "the request got through and the answer didn't come back". Every change carries its own label, so if the app has to send it again, the server recognises it and doesn't drink your bottle twice.
• Nothing silently overwrites someone else's change. If you share a cellar and someone else changed the same thing while you were offline — moved a bottle into the slot you were filling, or edited the same note — Cellarion doesn't pick a winner behind your back. The change is set aside under Needs attention, where you can see what happened and choose: keep yours, keep theirs, or drop it.

Turning it on

Go to Settings → Offline mode and tick Keep my cellar available offline on this device. Cellarion saves your cellar right away and keeps the copy up to date every time you use the app online.

In the installed app — the Android app, or Cellarion added to your home screen — it is on by default. In a web browser it is off until you turn it on. On a shared or borrowed computer, leave it off.

What is stored, and where

The copy lives only in your browser's storage on that device: your cellars, racks and bottles, small versions of your bottle photos, and any changes waiting to be sent. It is never sent anywhere else. It is deleted when you log out or turn offline mode off, and a session that has ended — because you logged out elsewhere, or your account was deleted — clears it the next time the app is online.

It is also small. Cards now use lightweight thumbnails instead of full-size photos, so even a large cellar with photos takes a few megabytes. That change makes every list faster online too: about forty times less to download per photo.

The privacy policy describes this in its section Offline mode (storage on your device).

Good to know

• The app has to have been opened online once after offline mode is on, so it can save itself and your cellar.
• The saved copy is as fresh as your last time online; the banner shows when that was.
• Adding a brand-new bottle needs a connection, because it looks the wine up in the shared registry.

Try it the next time you're down there with one bar of signal — or none.