Benlucky's Blog

Sherie and I enjoy wine. Reds especially, well Ben enjoys reds especially. And currently, Zins more especially…(Pause as I sip from the glass on my desk.)

So we occasionally visit a winery for entertainment. We are not actually that picky, as we can find a wine to enjoy anywhere, and often choose some moderate price stuff (Can you say 2 buck Chuck?). But after several visit to Rosenblum, because it is close to where we live and on our circuit, Sherie fell for the sales pitch of being on the wine club. So we are now Red Rangers at Rosenblum. And we also are on the club at Amador Cellars; a bit farther away, but owned by fiends of Sherie’s from the old days.

Now, in a wine club, you agree to buy some amount of wine that they pick out for you regularly. Usually several bottles every few months, at our level of commitment. And usually I like most of it, although you don’t get more than a bottle of anything, as these are meant as intro samplers to get you to buy more. Anyway, we sometimes buy more, and over time we have some many dozens of bottles in the garage “aging” or just waiting for us to bring them upstairs.

Now, I also buy less expensive “everyday” wines to drink, and many of these also end up in the garage. Which leads to the problem: what do we own, and where is it? Should we drink this bottle now, or wait to open it? Did we drink that special bottle I remember, or not? So I decided in my spare time to make a database of our wine collection that Sherie could access from her Mac laptop, and me from my PC desktop.

I decided on using Open Office Base instead of MS Access, as we don’t have MS for the Mac. And I am trying to learn to use Open Office regularly, for resume reasons. After a few days of work, we have a db that works pretty well. Some bugs yet, and it still resides on the embedded db on either local machine. So it is not a true “multi-user networked db,” which was the goal. Maybe I will get there sooner or later. See the picture above.

Anyway, we both have gotten carried away looking up info on the web about or wine, pasting text and pictures. After putting labels on the bottle tops, I can even tell at a glance what is where. And with a few reports, I can see at a glance what is ready to drink.

Email me if you want to share the work for your own collection. Maybe you can share back your bug fixes, because I have a place or two where I could not figure out the Basic to get it to do what I want. (Not that I am not a programmer, but a writer.)