Wine is complex, diverse, delicious and always full of surprises! But let's be honest, there is a lot of wank talked about wine.

This site aims to address this 'issue' and make wine enjoyable. You see, what's important about wine is whether you like it or not. It really doesn't matter what other people think.

The site will also take some of the pain out of keeping track of what is in your cellar.

With this site you can:

• Keep a detailed list of what's in your cellar
• Rate the wines in your cellar (coming soon)
• Sort your bottles anyway you like (Vintage, Region, Style, Variety etc)
• Leave tasting notes everytime you try a wine so you can see how it ages
• Keep track of when you should try a bottle next and when you think it will hit its prime.
• ...more to come

And best of all, it's all about what you think about a wine, not anyone else.

I hope this site is useful to you whatever stage you are at in your wine drinking.

The site will be constantly evolving so feel free to email me at wine@sommelier.net.au with your thoughts.

A fellow wine lover,

Hammy Goonan
Goonanism.com

Sommelier.net.au was designed and developed by wine lover and freelance web developer Hammy Goonan.

It came out of conversations with his brother, Angus, who is a wine maker and wanted Hammy to build a site so that he could keep track of what wines he had.

As an assistant wine maker, Angus travels Australia and the world, following the vintage and picking up a few bottles on the way. So he wanted to know how many bottles he had left in his cellar, what the wine tasted like last time he drank it, and what vintage he was working when he picked it up.

Hammy, seeing this as a great web development challenge, decided to put the site together and has been working on it since.

Hammy and Angus' father, Dinny Goonan, is also a wine maker whose wine can be found at dinnygoonan.com.au.

Hammy is available as a freelance web developer. His personal site is Goonanism.com

This site is meant to be as easy and intuitive to use as possible. Which should make this section irrelevant, right?

Well, hopefully, but let's cover all bases.

Getting started

Firstly you will need to login or sign up. This can be done via the home page. If you don't already have an account, simply type in your email address and password and the next page will collect the rest of your details. Naturally, you'll then have to confirm your new account by clicking on a link in the email you are sent.

From there it's time to start entering the details of the bottles in your cellar. The first page you see when you confirm your account has a link to the 'add bottle' page but you can also get there via the menu at the top of the screen.

Entering a new bottle

Entering a new bottle is fairly effortless. You can fill in as much or as little information as you'd like. If we already have the winery / region / variety of the bottle you are entering then an auto complete will help you out.

The important thing to note here is that you can enter in the number of bottles you bought rather than repeating the entry 6 times. Then, as you drink these bottles, you can update your cellar (by editing the bottle) and add tasting notes as you go so that you can watch the bottle age.

Editing

Once you've saved the bottle you will be taken to the edit screen. This is where you can add tasting notes every time you drink a bottle. You can update the number of bottles in your cellar, when you think you should try the wine next and what you think the best year will be for drinking the wine.

Once again, add as little or as much detail as you like - remember this is all for your own personal reference.

What you can edit is limited however. This is because the majority of the details simply don't change.

The Cellar

Your cellar is where you can see a list of all the bottles you have. They are ordered by winery but you can change that by clicking the arrow next to the title of the thing you want to order by (ie region, variety etc). There is no search functionality for the moment because this ordering feature seems to do the trick.

From this screen you can edit / view, archive or delete a bottle. Deleting will permanently remove the bottle from the site - tasting notes and all.

The Archive

This is the place to put your bottles once you have drunk them. It's just for your future reference. So when you are thinking to your self 'that bottle I had the other week would go perfectly with this meal', this is the place to go to find that bottle.

From here you can delete a bottle, edit its details or move it back to the cellar if needed.

Update Details

This is the bit where you can edit all your personal details. Update your address and email, and change your preferences with regards to receiving marketing material and notes regarding upgrades.

You can also delete your account here. If you do this ALL your details are removed from the site and will never be able to be retrieved again.

Your privacy is important and will be guarded closely. Your details will not be given away for the purposes of spam or anything like that.

However, we will be looking to partner with relevant companies for marketing purposes. If you have selected to recieve promotional material, from time to time we will provide you with offers from our marketing partners.

By doing this we ensure that this site remains free to use, is economically viable, and hopefully means that you get access to special offers that would interest you as a wine enthusiast.

We do our best to make sure that any promotional material is actually stuff you might be interested in.

If you would rather not receive these promos, then simply edit your user details and we will not bother you with them.

In addition, if you delete your account all your details will be permanently removed from our system and you will never hear from us again (unless of course you sign up again).

If you have any questions or concerns about this, please do not hesitate to contact the site administrator, wine@sommelier.net.au.

This website is optimised for 'Standards Compliant' web browsers.

Standards compliant web browsers include Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. We recommend using these browsers while viewing this site.

Standards Compliant allows for interoperablity across operating systems, disability access and uniform approaches to website development. In other words, it means that web developers don't have to create a difference version of each website for each web browser. To find out more, you can read the Wikipedia entry on Standards Compliance.

In addition, this site makes the most of some more advanced features that web browsers such as Internet Explorer seem to struggle with, although the site should still work with these browsers.

If you are still using Internet Explorer 6, please seriously consider upgrading, for everyone's sake.