Wine Message Board

Hi,

I've set up this Group for folks who love wine or wine books or both. My Library Thing wine library is located at http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=RobertRoss .

This collection is limited to wine related books, a few of which are located in our home, but the majority of which have been donated to the Franklin Lakes library, where they are available on inter-library loan to all libraries in Bergen County, New Jersey.

The collection has been immeasurably enhanced by suggestions from a number of participants on the Forums maintained by Robin Garr who maintains an excellent website for wine lovers, the oldest, largest and most popular independent wine-appreciation site on the World Wide Web at http://www.wineloverspage.com/

I plan to enhance the Reviews of the books already listed, and add other great wine books, primarily those suggested by participants on the Wine Lovers Page discussion groups or by participants on this Message board. Please feel free to join in.

Regards, Bob

Bob, your wine book collection looks fantastic! I'll have to peruse it for some interesting reads. One book I'd recommend from my own library is Champagne : How the World's Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times. It's a great history of the region, the wine, and some of the personalities that made the name Champagne stand out.

Hi Bob! Thanks for setting this up; happy to be here. cheers -- Patchen

Welcome ExVivre and Patchen.

I'll add the Champagne book to the WLP Library soon -- thanks for suggesting it. I have a copy and enjoyed reading it.

I must say I'm having a great deal of fun writing "Reviews" of my books, sort of like visiting with old friends and chatting a bit -- and Googling to see how other people have enjoyed them or not. I've re-written my Amerine "Tasting" review, and will probably work my way down the list.

I discovered a flaw in the system during the editing process, and Tim Spalding corrected it within two hours: "Thanks. I solved it. It was showing reviews for "deleted" books. (In >fact, for database reasons it doesn't delete right away, but sets a "deleted flag" and deletes it later.)"

Tim also asked me to visit http://www.corkd.com/ ; "Corkd and I are going to see if we can come up with "People who like the DaVinci code drink Merlot," seriously. Tim."

I like Tim's style! :-) Regards, Bob

I've harrassed Tim ever since he mentioned Corkd and WineLog that we need a book and wine statistic. Personally, I would've thought DaVinci Code readers generally fall in the White Zinfandel set. ;)

(OK, I've read the book, but my cellar is pink zin free!)

Unfortunately Cork'd seems very clunky, buggy and feature poor after LibraryThing

I agree, they're both rather sad sites. I opened a WineLog account too soon to discover that it's based more on tasting notes than personal collections. To my mind, a great wine site would have both and more.

You guys might enjoy checking out www.cellartracker.com - it's one of my favorite sites for tracking both collections and tasting notes for wine.

Best,
Scott

Sorry the link didn't work - www.cellartracker.com

One of the reasons LibraryThing added the ability to list your other services—including WineLog and Cork'd—was to accumulate a critical mass and then, maybe, work with those sites to do "People who like Merlot like..."

I have to say, I rather LIKE Cork'd. That said, I stopped using it after a while. I'd like to be able to find the wine quickly, and have labels for most of them. I think the users would do it, and if not, the wineries.

Scott - I tried CellerTracker and was instanty hooked. It is way powerful.

Big problem on any cellar book online or offline is entering all the wine data, but CellarTracker has virtually every wine there is already in its database so all the name/appellation details are already there for you to use. I added 300 wines and had to enter from scratch only 2 wines.

Fast support and free -- although I soon donated the suggested $20 contribution I am so knocked out with it.

BTW - WineLog seems to off the air now and there is another site www.wineisgood.com that offers a basic online cellar book

I agree with all the comments on Cellar Tracker. I've got my wine collection on an Excel spreadsheet, and it works pretty well.

Except, I lent most of the space to a friend for a big collection, then Janet booted me out of "her" cellar, and I've moved the physical bottles to a new cellar she made for me.

But, the guys who took my friend's wines off to auction, destroyed part of the index, and I added to the chaos by moving "my" wines into "my cellar".

So, I need to re-enter everything. But Cellar Tracker looks much more powerful than my Excel spreadsheet.

Even though I keep limping along with it. :-(

Regards, Bob

Hiya. I was secondhand browsing the other day and read the first chapter of Blackberry wine, which really made me smile. It's fiction but it starts off from the point of view of a bottle of wine. Cute and rather witty. After that it switches to the male character, and with such a great start I'm almost afraid to read the rest, lest it disappoint!

Bob

You upload your excel to CellarTracker to save re-entering-- and download your entire CellarTracker database to Excel as backup or to graph your cellar. Give it a go.

Sippose we are getting off subject here, so I'll add that I started Thomas Pellechia's
Wine: The 8,000 Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade last night. It is not as interesting as I'd hoped.

I hope this will be of interest to folks in the wine group. My wife and I are opening a bookshop in Portland Maine this spring which will specialize in books on food, wine and the arts. The shop has been named 'Rabelais', and will have new, out-of-print and rare books, as well as some prints, photographs and ephemera. We're building now, in a space next to Hugo's a great portland restaurant, on perhaps the ultimate foodie block in Portland. I've been a librarythinger for a while now, but just with pieces of my own, mostly non-cookbook library. our shop will have several thousand books in gastronomy, the arts and whatever else strikes our fancy. You can see a bit of what we're about on our nascent website: www.rabelaisbooks.com. We'd love people's feedback on what to carry, what you like in a shop, don't like, etc. Thanks.

pmwb, I'm rather slow in responding to #14 above, but I've almost finished Hugh Johnson's Vintage: The Story of Wine and found it quite interesting, full of enlightening details, and very readable.

Finished Jay McInerney's A Hedonist in the Cellar, which seemed a much more mature, thoughtful work than his earlier collection of wine essays, Bacchus and Me. Perhaps he's mellowed with age. I'm very much enjoying Kingsley Amis' On Drink, which, while it focuses more on booze than wine, is sharp and hilarious on the uses of drinking.

Enjoying the discussion here!

I'll check out CellarTracker, I have really been hoping to find a LibraryThing for wine...although, lol.....they'd better have wishlists, 'cause there will always be more wine that I WISH I have tried than wine that I actually have...(and printing out such a list would be great to take to the store).

I recently thoroughly enjoyed Natalie McLean's Red, White, and Drunk All Over and would like to highly recommend it to everyone here.

Ah ha! My wife gave me a copy of McLean's book for Christmas, but it has so far only made it near to my "to read soon" pile. Thanks to Atomicmutant, I'll have to move it up in the (always overcrowded) queue.

CellarTracker does have wishlists.