bottle posts

What cheers the soul more on a cold winter's night than a fine glass of wine? An app to keep track of that wine, perhaps. The new 2.0 version of the $2.99 Cellar for iPhone [iTunes link], out now, adds more fun and new sharing options to the good-looking wine management tool. If you're a high-level oenophile looking for a hardcore wine research and cellar inventory app, Cellar may not be for you (I'd recommend the powerful and savvy Drync for $4.99, or the free ad-supported version), but for casual imbibers and wine fans, it's a charmer.

Cellar is simple to use and fun to show off. You add bottles one at a time to your collection (slotting them into the cellar, the garage or the wishlist), customizing the look and label of each bottle and adding vintage, price, ratings and other details if you have them.

Your bottles are displayed attractively in a horizontal rack, which can be swiped back and forth; turning the iPhone or iPod touch from landscape to portrait mode switches you into a new detail view where you can see your notes and other info about a particular wine. The UI is graceful and well-detailed without being garish; an app about wine, after all, should carry itself with a degree of classiness.

When I first looked at Cellar last summer, one of the drawbacks of the app was that there wasn't a good way to share your wine collections or favorite bottles with friends, nor could you easily back up your cellar data. Both of those issues have been amply addressed. You can now create 'bottle links,' very long encoded URLs (amenable to abbreviation by URL shorteners like TinyURL) that, when opened in the iPhone mail app, Mobile Safari or popular iPhone Twitter apps, auto-launch Cellar and load the bottle into your collection, label and all -- magical.

You can also backup and restore wine libraries from your Mac or PC, or merge libraries with other users in the vicinity using the app's built-in Web server via Wi-Fi. New searching, sorting and statistics options add to the improved/introduced feature list with 2.0.

Cellar 2 doesn't have the wine search capability of Drync or some of the other wine apps on the store, but it does have panache; it's a showcase app for my iPhone on looks and functionality, and it's perfect for keeping track of the bottle you drank out on the town that you want to remember for purchase later on. Check out more of the Cellar interface in the gallery below.

Gallery: Cellar 2.0 for iPhone