HILUXURY – Hawaii Luxury Magazine

Inventory wine with eSommelier

eSommelier is the first residential, integrated wine management server that allows wine connoisseurs and collectors to manage wine cellars at home or abroad. It is designed as a “plug and play” solution for wine collectors to access their entire wine library with a touch of a button.

“The problem with amassing a large wine collection is knowing what you have and, more importantly, when you should drink it,” says Joe Hageman, a partner in eSommelier. “eSommelier gives our clients instant access to all of the wines in their collection so they can quickly find that perfect bottle of wine that is drinking at its best at any given moment.”

The eSommelier system consists of a touch screen interface with an internal hard drive storing eSommelier’s database of 130,000+ wines from around the world. When cataloging a bottle of wine, the user selects the country, region, variety, winery and vintage from a prompted list instead of manually typing in the information. With eSommelier, the average time to catalog one bottle is two minutes, and the user has the option of entering in personalized rating and tasting notes – a helpful tool for wine aficionados who enjoy tracking the progression of each wine as it ages.

Prior to eSommelier, wine management consisted of handwritten “cellar journals” or spreadsheets, requiring the user to manually write or type the information about each bottle. This might be acceptable for a small collection that is ready to drink, but the larger collections likely exceed 1,000 bottles, and typing in everything would be painfully time-consuming. The simplicity of eSommelier’s wine management server is even appealing to the non tech-savvy individual.

Using the system, unprecedented control and searching of the wine cellar is done with its Internet connectivity for access anywhere in the world. Collectors with a second home or who store wine off-site will find this extremely helpful. Searching can be done by any parameter to find the perfect wine to pair with a meal. The system also can recall the exact location of the wine bottle in the cellar.

After entering wine information into the system, a unique barcode for each bottle is created and printed. This allows collectors to scan the barcode and track the bottle – it is automatically removed from the collection following a scan. Tracking individual bottles rather than “bins” or cases creates efficiency for the users to differentiate between the locations of each individual bottle within a cellar.

The eSommelier System is $8,000 and consists of a 15-inch touch screen computer, a hard-wired barcode scanner and a barcode printer. Additionally, the wireless eSommelier Elite solution recently was released and is sold as a turnkey solution based on the size of the wine cellar (prices vary).

Connoisseurs are offered a concierge service to catalog their entire collection. eSommelier systems are offered via custom home entertainment dealers, and interested parties should visit www.esommelier.net for more information.