When Cellarion Asks About One of Your Bottles

One registry, shared by everyone

When you add a bottle to Cellarion, you're not typing into a private spreadsheet. Your bottle points at a record in a shared wine registry — the same record everyone else's bottle of that wine points at. That's what makes search find things, duplicates collapse instead of multiply, drink windows arrive already curated, and statistics mean something.

It also means the registry's quality is everyone's quality. So we work on it constantly. This summer alone that has meant merging hundreds of duplicate records, moving misplaced names into their right fields (a famous château was briefly "produced by Bordeaux" — the region, not a winery), and teaching grapes to speak the label's language: a Douro Port in Cellarion now says Tinta Roriz where it used to say Tempranillo — same grape, but only one of those words is on the bottle.

Most of that work never needs to involve you. A wrong producer can be verified against the estate's own website; a duplicate betrays itself; our sommelier curation reviews drink windows and tasting profiles wine by wine, with every change checked before it lands. The registry gets better while you sleep.

But some answers aren't on the internet

Here's the honest part: a small residue of records defeats every tool we have. A bottle imported years ago with the producer recorded as "Unknown". A wine whose grape contradicts what that vineyard planted in that year. A label that might be a small Turkish producer — or might be a German Riesling filed under the wrong country. We've researched these against producer sites, appellation registers, and importers, and come up empty, because the answer isn't online.

The answer is on a label. In someone's cellar. Possibly yours.

At any given time it's only a small handful of records in the whole registry — but each one is a wine somebody genuinely owns and cares about, which is precisely why we won't guess. A wrong guess in a shared registry is worse than an honest gap.

So Cellarion can now ask you

Starting this week, when a curator hits one of these dead ends, they can send a question to the people who own a bottle of that wine. If that's you, here's what it looks like:

• You get a normal Cellarion notification — "A curator has a question about a wine in your cellar."

• It opens your bottle's page, where the question sits in a card: usually something like "What does the label say the producer is?"

• You answer in a sentence, or you ignore it. Both are fine.

If you answer, a curator reads it, fixes the record, and every copy of that wine — yours and everyone else's — gets better. The fix is often live within a day.

The fine print, because it matters

We built this the same way we build everything that touches your data:

• Questions are rare and human. Only administrators and sommelier-curators can ask, one open question per wine, only when research has failed.

• Curators don't see who you are. Answers reach them anonymised — "owner 1 says the label reads…". No names, no emails.

• No email. Questions arrive as in-app notifications (and push, if you've enabled it). Your inbox is not part of this.

• It's about the wine, not about you. Your answer is a fact about a label. It's included in your data export, removed if you delete your account, and questions expire on their own after 60 days.

It goes both ways

This closes a loop that already runs in your direction: if you spot something wrong with a wine — a misspelled producer, a duplicate, a suspicious vintage — the Report action on any wine page has always been the way to tell us, and those reports get read and acted on. Now the conversation works in both directions, and the last few mysteries in the registry finally have somewhere to go.

So if a question about one of your bottles shows up in your bell one day — that's not a bug, and it's not spam. That's the registry asking the only person in the world who can see the answer.

Cellarion is free, open-source, and lives at cellarion.app. The registry work described here ships in the current release — and if you'd like to help in other ways, we're also looking for translators.