Usage figures

Fair question, and worth answering in both halves.

Usage first. Cellarion has 322 registered accounts, 130 of them active in the last month — and 91 signed up during August, so it is growing rather than flat. Four support the project financially. Between them they track 11,258 bottles across 318 cellars, plus about a thousand already drunk and logged. The average cellar holds around 55 bottles; the largest is just over 800. Small numbers, and I would rather give you the real ones.

The registry holds 6,761 wines, about 2,200 of them with a bottle image, from 3,308 photographs uploaded in total.

Where it comes from — mostly the people using it. Add a bottle that is not in the registry and the wine gets created, so it has grown as a by-product of people cataloguing their own cellars. Most bottle photography was taken by the owners of those bottles.

How a wine actually gets in: you photograph the label, AI reads it and proposes producer, name, region and grapes, and you confirm before it is saved. Quick, usually right, and also where most of our errors start — a misread producer name, an appellation mistaken for a wine name. Cleaning those up is most of what the curator role does.

One importer catalogue is here with their permission — Tryffelsvinet, a Swedish importer, credited on every wine it supplied. It is the only third-party catalogue we hold; we do not scrape retailers and we do not hot-link images. And it is an open door: if you know a winery, importer or distributor who would like their range represented properly, we can bring a catalogue in and credit it to them. The only condition is permission — which is why there is one and not a dozen.

We also do not buy wine data. Commercial APIs exist, and we deliberately do not use them. Partly cost: those four supporters cover some of the hosting and running, and the rest comes out of my own pocket. But mainly because licensed data would not belong to this project. Cellarion is open source, AGPL-3.0, and anyone can self-host it — a registry built on a subscription would leave a hole in every copy. Everything here is contributed, permissioned, or curated by hand with AI assistance.

On the tasting notes and drink windows: we do not employ a sommelier. Cellarion has a curator role, and the people working in it do their best with AI as a research tool. What changed is the method. Descriptions used to be generated automatically in bulk with nobody checking them; we looked at how good they actually were and it was not good enough. That is switched off now. Wines are worked through one at a time instead, and older notes are marked unverified rather than dressed up.

Which brings me to the part that is on all of us. A shared registry is only as good as what goes into it. If a wine is wrong, report it from its page. If your bottle has no photo, add one. If the grapes are missing and you are holding the bottle, suggest them. You have the bottle in your hand, and we do not.

Good explanation. Does the self hosted version have access to the shared registry as well?

No it doesn't, but you can export your data and you should get all wine data about all your bottles you have, but you only get images you self have added.

Thanks for the detailed info.

That's really good to know that the project is growing 💗

Thank you!

Funny thing — we built Cellarion for ourselves, because a free, open-source option was simply missing in this space. That other people like it and use it is the best part.

Now they have access to the wine registry.

I might try to self host to see how it works. Thank you