Hello Richard,

You asked to tell you more about my WineCellarDataBase, so I try.
Already I want to excuse my poor English.

Before I started to builded one of my own I looked at some Professional DataBases to keep track of wines tasted and in cellar. I am not a drinker, I just like a glass of wine with dinner over the weekend. But I am interested in everything involved and always looking for opportunities to taste a wine I don’t know.

Professional DataBases  have a couple of things in common; they keep stock without the chance to divide the wines in cellar in categories and they give the possibility to save a lot of data and even have a lot of information already in the program, which I would only want to have for the wines in cellar. So those programs, they are al good by the way, either ask for information I would not want to add for all wines tasted and therefore leaf a lot of blanc fields and records in the DataBase.

From my point of view the fun is just to add the information myself for the wines I want this information and see the Database grow over the years to come. Information gathering over time and only the information I really want to have without leaving fields blanc, if anyway possible.

I decided to start building a DataBase from my point of view.
From the wines I taste(d) I gather only most of the information that’s on the bottle.
Giving points from 1 to 100 for the way the wine tastes for me unregarded what list like Parker or Johnson would grade the wine, for they give points in regard to other wines from the same grape or country/region they are made in.

When I decide to buy a wine to store in my “cellar” I run into the other problem with programs on the market. They don’t let us store them in categories. I want to make a difference because I buy wines to drink within the next year (or two), wines to store for at least 10 years and wines I want to follow over a number of years drinking them let’s say every two years to see how they ripe over time. Mostly to see if they are good enough to store for over more then 10 years. If they are I would buy them to store when a really good year comes around.

Now since I drink not more then about 20 bottles a year it makes sense to keep track of the wines in cellar. I don’t want to come to a point that there are to many bottles in my cellar who might run out of drink-ability. If a wine is “over the top” it is no longer a pleasure to drink them. So I would like to be ahead of that.

And of course from the past I learned that goal does not always will happen. So we run in to years where there are wines that has to be drunken a.s.a.p.

Four categories; Drink asap; drink (within 1 or 2 yrs), long time storage and follow over the years. One specific wine could fall into at least two of the categories.

What I would like to know is how many bottles in total there are in my cellar from a certain wine and how many of those are in what categories. Also important is the possibility to prevent storage (in total) for wines that I store for 10 or more years more than a maximum because there will always be wines better (read more tastier) then I have tasted up until now.

Hope you have a good idea what I am looking for now.

Thankx in advance

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Reply from Richard Rost:

That's very interesting. Thank you for the thorough explanation. I, too, enjoy a good bottle of wine with dinner from time to time. I've been on a couple of wine tours with my wife over the years.

Anyhow, it seems to me like your database should have pretty straightforward tables and fields. You would want a WineT to track information on each type of wine. I would add the usual fields (name, year, etc.) that are common to ALL wines. Then add whatever fields you want to assign points for the "taste." I would add a simple QuantityOnHand field to keep track of how many bottles of this type of wine you have in your cellar. Nothing fancy yet.

Your categories (drink now, 1-2 years, etc.) could be a simple CategoryT table. You can create a combo box in your WineF form to select a category. That's a pretty simple 1-to-many relationship that's covered in Access 201 or 202. Again, not too hard.

If there are VARIABLE items that you wish to enter that you might not select for ALL wines, you could use a many-to-many relationship with a subform, similar to the classification system I show in Access 309 where I add customers to groups. Every customer can be in any number of groups - and every group can contain any number of customers. You could do the same with your wines. So if you want to create a category called "semi-sweet" for example, you could then select it for each of the wines that it belongs to. You could then generate reports to show all of the wines in a specific category.