Wine Making Software / Service

[dmcquade]

Hey everyone!


Recently I had a brief email discussion with George about an idea I had and he recommended posting it here to see whateveryone thinks.


I own a personal wine management service that allows users to track the wines they currently have in their inventory. This is a community-based service that allows users to rate wines and talk to other users. The service is fee with optional subscriptions.


While I am new to winemaking, I was thinking about starting work on a winemakers service. I was imagining something that would allow you to track your supplies, containers (ie, Carboy #1, Fermenter #1, etc), and batch progress. It would include automatic calculations (ie, enter the starting SG and potential alcohol is automatically calculated), "Records" (record SG / temp at various times), tweaks (ie, enter a target alcohol % and see sugar required to get there), and a bunch of other features too many to mention.


The primary benefit of this is thatmembers could make their logs available to other users and share winemaking experiences at a more detailed level.


When you bottle a batch of wine, you could automatically transfer the bottles to our Wine Management Service where you can track Racks and Rack positions of your wine.


For those of you loyal to George and FineVineWines (as am I), you will be happy to know that we will not be creating any wine making forums and FineVineWines will be our sole "provider" of winemaking equipment.


I think that's about it. I would be interested to hear any feedback you might have. A lot of people are usually concerned about backups and loosing their data, but we always provide a way to pull all of your data out of the system and will even email a backup to you at regular intervals if desired.


Also, if you know of an existing service (I couldn't find one) that provides these services, let me know. I don't want to reinvent the wheel unless I know I can make it better.


Oh, one more note ... the service would model our Wine Management Service ... free with optional subscriptions.


Thanks!


DJ

 

[Wade E]

It sounds pretty cool but at this moment as a small home winemaker I
have no need for such a service. Hopefully someday I will have a need
though.

 

[dmcquade]

Sorry, let me clarify that a bit. The service would only be geared toward home winemakers. It wouldn't bea "professional" application.

 

[Wade E]

I have seen this type of program before on this or another forum. I
have never tried it and would not pay for it as I really dont need it
but if its there I would use it so that I and others may look upon it
and see what everyone is doing. Would you have a spot for all
ingredients included? How extravegent will this be? I see you have
included ways to figure how to adjust abv. and SG, how about acidity
and such?

 

[GrapeApe]

I created a simpledatabase in MS-Access for this very purpose. It basically has 3 joined tables, one to storegeneral info (date kit purchased, price, vendor, type, serial #, etc.), one to storeprocess (date started, SG readings, racking dates, notes, etc.), and one to storetasting notes since the bottles will taste differently based on how much time in the bottle.


It's a simple database, but I find it very useful even with only 5 kits under my belt, especially when I have several kits going at once. I can never remember when I did the last step or when the next step is due.


DJ, if the service is free, I'd be up for a peek.


GrapeApe.

 

[dmcquade]

Alright, I'll start working on it and I'll let you all know when it is up and running.


Cheers!


DJ

 

[dmcquade]

I have seen this type of program before on this or another forum. I have never tried it and would not pay for it as I really dont need it but if its there I would use it so that I and others may look upon it and see what everyone is doing. Would you have a spot for all ingredients included? How extravegent will this be? I see you have included ways to figure how to adjust abv. and SG, how about acidity and such?

Wade,


I'm planning to put in as many measurements as possible. My goal is to make it so that there is some way to enter anything you could possibly do to a must. If there's anything that would be important to you, just put it here and I'll add it.


DJ

 

[PeterZ]

DJ, post a link to your wine management service. I'd love to look at it. I can just see calling the cardboard box on the bottom of the stack "Bin A", the next one up "Bin B", etc.

As a geek I have to ask what runs the system? PHP front end and MySQL, or ASP/VBScript and SQL Server, or?

 

[dmcquade]

Peter,


Gladly! It's ASP/VB ScriptonMySQL.The eventual plan is to convert everything to ASP.NET.


http://www.mywineassistant.com


DJ

 

[rgecaprock]

DJ,
It sounds really interesting to me and any tools that can help me I'm all for it. I'm probably one of the lowest volume winemakers on the forum for several reasons but I would love to have access to your program.


I'm curious.....Ramona