Smellier
Field notes, September 2026Forty-one wines, drawn rather than photographed, on a shelf that knows what to open next and roughly what the rest is worth.
The note on my phone was called wine. It had producers and years in it and no dates of any other kind, which meant it could tell me what I owned and not whether any of it was still good. That is the only question a cellar actually asks. So this one takes today's date as an input, and every bottle on it reads differently next year without anyone touching the data.
It is the third of these. The chairs got a room and the mugs got a shelf, and this one gets a rack, a valuation, and a view called tonight.
Every bottle has a verb
The chairs had a motion field, and it turned out to be the most useful column in the set, so the wine has one too. Its values are what you do with the bottle when you open it.
| Verb | What it asks of you | For instance |
|---|---|---|
| pour | Open it and pour, no ceremony | Côtes du Rhône, Rioja Reserva |
| decant | An hour or two in a decanter first | Barolo, Pauillac, Monte Bello |
| swirl | A big glass and ten minutes of air | Meursault, Grüner, dry chenin |
| chill | Forty minutes in the fridge, not an hour | Riesling, Bandol rosé, manzanilla |
| pop | Cold, and open it at the table | Champagne |
| sip | A small glass, and it keeps for weeks | Vintage port, tawny |
Hovering a bottle plays its verb. A champagne jumps, a Barolo tilts slowly and holds, a riesling shivers. It is the same trick as the chairs, an invisible person handling the object, and it does the same job: the card tells you how to treat the thing before you have read a word.
The bottles are drawn
There are no photographs. Every bottle is an SVG built from one of six silhouettes, and the silhouettes are the ones the regions actually ship in. Bordeaux has a square shoulder. Burgundy slopes. Champagne is heavier and wider. The Mosel flute is tall and thin, Provence rosé tapers at the base, and port has a bulge in the neck to catch the sediment. Glass color and capsule color are per wine. The label carries the vintage in my handwriting, and the producer name on it is too small to read on the card and exactly legible when you open the bottle full size, which was not planned and I kept.
A photo would have been faster and would have meant forty product shots I did not own. Drawing them also made the rack possible, because a rack of ninety-seven bottles is one SVG and exports to a picture with the font embedded.
The bottles are real now, mostly
The first version drew every bottle. Then the shelf became my actual shelf, twenty-five bottles that are mostly Californian and mostly from the years I was not paying attention, and drawings of real bottles felt like a lie. So the site went and found product shots for each one, and a small Vision-framework tool, the same trick as the mug shelf, lifts each bottle off its white background. Two bottles could not be found anywhere online, one of them a homemade label called Talkative Turtle, and those are still drawn. I like that the drawing is now the exception that says nobody photographs this.
The rack is the bookcase in my living room
Bottles stand up on the shelf, the way they do in my kitchen, in three bays across. The unit around them is the one I sit across from every day: pale birch, and sliding doors in burgundy, black, white and sage that cover some of the bays and leave others open. Click a door and it slides one bay along its track. Whatever it uncovers was there all along, which is also true of the real bookcase.
Point it at the whole shelf
The label reader started as OCR in the browser, which reads one label at a time and gets the year wrong more often than the name. It is still there as the fallback. With a model connected, a photo of the whole rack goes to Claude once and comes back as a list: every bottle it could read, a vintage, and for anything the site has never heard of, a rough retail price and drink window marked as a guess. A shelf of twenty-five bottles costs a few cents to read. The photo is not stored anywhere, and the page says which of the two readers it used.
Four words instead of a score
Each wine carries three numbers, years after the vintage: when it opens, when it peaks, when it closes. From those and today's date every bottle gets one of four words. Hold is before the window opens. Ready is inside it. Drink up is the last forty percent of the stretch after the peak, where every year now costs something. Past is after it closes, and the honest advice becomes cook with it.
Two bottles on the seeded shelf are past. One is a Bourgogne Blanc I held for eight years by accident. It is the bottle the site was built to find.
The prices are estimates and the site says so
Every card has a dollar figure and none of them is a quote. Release price is roughly what the bottle cost when it came out. Market price is roughly what the vintage trades for now, looked up by hand rather than pulled from a feed. Projections come from a model small enough to state in one paragraph: two percent base drift, just under one percent per critic point above 92, and a maturity term that is positive while the market waits for the wine to open, flat inside the window, and negative after it. Anything under forty dollars gets a quarter of that, because a nineteen dollar Côtes du Rhône does not have a secondary market no matter what a spreadsheet says.
The chairs put their caveat in a comment at the top of the data file. This one does that too and adds a panel in the sidebar, because a number with a dollar sign reads as a measurement even harder than a score out of five does.
Tonight is the point
The grid is the index. The view I actually open is tonight. You tap what you are eating, in the words you would use with the fridge open, and it ranks the shelf. Each wine has four dishes in order, so a first-listed match beats a fourth, a bottle that needs drinking soon gets a bump, and nothing on hold or past its window is ever suggested. It is a sommelier in the sense that it protects you from your own cellar. With nothing selected it lists whatever has the least window left, which is the other question I kept asking.
The label reader runs in your browser
Adding a bottle means pointing a camera at a label. The reading is OCR in the browser, nothing leaves the device, and the words it finds are matched against about a hundred producers the site knows. Then it asks you for the vintage, because it gets the year wrong more often than the name, and a wrong year is a wrong window. What you add lives in local storage, so each browser is its own shelf. That is the smallest version of everyone getting their own cellar, and it was enough to ship.
What I would change
The market prices should move. They are a snapshot from September and the site would be much better with a feed behind it, even a weekly one. The reader knows a hundred producers and the world has more; the right fix is a real wine database rather than a longer list. And the window assumes proper storage, which is the assumption every wine chart makes and almost no bottle has met. It wants a column for where the bottle actually lived.