Deep Dive on how the Drinkability Alert Report is Created
Welcome to a peek inside how CellarTracker uses our twenty plus years of experience to bring new insights and value to the wine-collecting experience. The “What’s Poppin’” drinkability alert is the first in our series of data-driven personalized cellar reports for subscribers. If you found this report useful, we thought you might like some insight into how it was generated.
The report is broken into two parts. The first is designed to alert you to wines in your cellar that may be past their prime drinking windows and deserve your attention. This is a lagging indicator. The second—and what is the heart of the report—is a report that shows which wines from your cellar are being consumed ‘above par’ and can be considered a present indicator of wines of interest.
One note: These reports are purely generated from actual data and can be considered descriptive. They do not rely on drinking windows which are usually generated before or right after the first encounter and can be described as proscriptive. Your palate is the ultimate judge, and looking at the optimal from both sides is useful.
Heating Up
The first report is truly ‘What’s Poppin’?” and represents the depth of detail that the CellarTracker data can truly reveal. To smooth out volatility, a wine must be held by at least 100 CellarTracker users and must have been consumed at least ten times in the past three months to be considered for this report.
For wines that qualify, we take the consumption rate today and compare it to the consumption rate of one month ago. Consumption rate is defined in aggregate as the daily count of bottles consumed over the total available bottles. The goal is to calculate a demand for that wine that is independent of overall supply. We look at the average over the three-month window to account for instantaneous spikes as well as typical variances such as weekend consumption being above weekday. This delivers a report of wines being consumed at a higher rate than a month ago and might be of interest to those holding them.
It is important to note that this is a signal above the random noise. It does not tell us why these wines are being consumed above par. It might be that the collective wisdom of the CellarTracker community is generating information about those wines that they are peaking ahead of schedule.
Drinking windows are based on barrel samples, early bottles, and informed speculation. With this report, we are hoping to add real-time drinking data to help inform how drinking window can be evolving. There can also be factors that are not intrinsic to the wine itself—people like decades and there is a blip of 1994 Port being consumed in 2024.
In addition to the literal data on consumption, we added an AI-generated summary of the relevant tastings notes on each wine. This provides additional context to help you understand if the wines are truly being opened based on their readiness or if there are cases of regret for opening too soon.
Drink Now
The second report is a simple calculation. It looks at all the wines in your cellar and finds the wines where the aggregate of active users has consumed over 85% of their total bottles. This is not a perfect marker as some people do prefer wines with more age but does indicate that the majority of fellow CellarTracker users decided this wine should be consumed. With a cellar of sufficient size, it is easy to forget bottles, and this is a reminder and hopefully not too late.
Example of the Report
