Wine Tracker

Track a physical wine cellar inside Obsidian — by note, vintage, lot and drinking window.

Every bottle you own lives in a normal Markdown note. The plugin reads and writes those notes, so your cellar stays yours: no database, no account, no network requests. Uninstall the plugin and the data is still there, readable, in plain text.

What it does

• Per-lot tracking. A wine you bought twice is two lots, each with its own price, purchase date, shelf and quantity. Drinking three bottles from the 2019 case doesn't touch the case you bought last year.
• Phased drinking windows. Split one lot across several windows — drink 3 in 2027–2031, hold 3 for 2032–2036 — and the dashboard reports each phase separately.
• Status views. Dashboard, monthly and sidebar views showing what's ready, what's overdue and what's still cellaring.
• Tasting log. Log a tasting with a score and notes, into your daily note.
• Optional finance logging. If you enter a purchase price, a spending line is written to your daily note.

Installation

Desktop only. Requires Obsidian 1.2.8 or later.

From Obsidian

Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search for Wine Tracker → Install → Enable.

Manual

Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release and drop them into VaultFolder/.obsidian/plugins/wine-tracker/, then reload Obsidian and enable the plugin.

Getting started

1. Enable the plugin.
2. Open settings and set Wine notes folder (default Wine/Wines) and, if you want tasting or spending logs, Daily notes folder.
3. Run Wine Tracker: Add bottle from the command palette, or click the wine glass in the ribbon to open the dashboard.

Commands

Add bottle

Opens a modal. Only four fields are required: producer, cuvée, varietal, and vintage. Everything else is optional.

Optional fields: qty (defaults to 1), purchase date, purchase price, shelf location, drinking window (start/end years), phased drinking windows, region, country, style, bottle size, source/merchant, current price, gift toggle, notes, rebuy toggle, do-not-buy-again toggle.

What happens on save:

1. Creates the wine note at {wine notes folder}/{{producer}} - {{cuvee}} ({{grape}}).md if it doesn't exist
2. Upserts flat frontmatter (wine_id, producer, cuvee, grape, region, country, style, rebuy, do_not_buy_again)
3. Appends the new lot to the matching vintage in the wine-inventory block (or creates the vintage entry)
4. If a purchase price is present, writes a spending entry under your finance heading in today's daily note
5. Rebuilds the index cache

Phased drinking windows — enter one line per phase in the Window phases field:

3,2027,2031
3,2032,2036

Each line is qty,start,end. Use qty,before YYYY for a "drink before" style window.

If no window is entered and the varietal/style is recognised, a window is inferred automatically.

Consume bottle

Three-step modal:

1. Choose wine — searchable list of wines with stock remaining
2. Choose lot — shows qty, shelf, purchase price, and window phases for each lot with stock; lot choice is always explicit
3. Confirm & log tasting — enter an optional score (/5) and tasting notes

On confirm:

• Decrements the lot qty by 1 (zero-qty lots are kept as consumed history, never deleted)
• Writes a tasting stub under your tasting log marker in today's daily note:

- [ ] #log/wine/tasting-note [[St Hallett Blockhead]] 2021 4/5 %%wine-lot:2021-a%%
    - Plush fruit, ready now.

Edit lot

Three-step modal: choose wine → choose lot → edit form.

Editable fields: qty, purchase date, purchase price, current price, shelf, source, bottle size, drinking windows (same qty,start,end format as Add bottle), notes, gift toggle.

Writes back to the wine note and rebuilds the cache.

Log tasting

Quick-log without consuming from inventory. A dropdown pre-fills wine, vintage, and lot ID from cached stock. Manual text fields are available for wines not in inventory (e.g. tasting at a restaurant).

Writes the same tasting stub format to today's daily note as Consume bottle.

Refresh prices/windows

Updates current prices and fills in missing drinking windows for a single wine note. Everything is computed locally — the plugin never contacts a price service.

If a wine note is open when you run the command, it opens directly on that note. Otherwise it shows a searchable picker.

The proposals screen shows every lot in the note. For each lot:

• Current price field — pre-filled using this priority order:

  1. Existing value — if current_price is already set in the note, it is preserved (you can still edit it)
  2. Heuristic estimate — purchase price compounded at an annual appreciation rate based on grape/style (Shiraz/Cabernet/Nebbiolo: 5%, Pinot Noir/Riesling: 4%, sparkling: 6%, fortified: 7%, default: 3%), calculated from the purchase date or vintage year
  3. No estimate — if no purchase price exists, the field is blank for manual entry

• Proposed window — if the lot has no drinking window defined, an inferred window is shown (using the same heuristic as Add bottle). This is added on save; existing windows are never overwritten.

Nothing is written to the note until you hit Save.

Dashboard & monthly views

Dashboard — sections for:

• Drink now — wines inside their drinking window
• Overdue — wines past their window
• Cellaring — wines not yet at window start
• All inventory — every lot with stock

Monthly block — add a wine-plugin-monthly code block to any monthly note. The reference year is read from the note's filename (YYYY-MM.md), so viewing a past month shows the status as it would have been then.

Sidebar — shows Drink now and Overdue counts in the right panel.

All views have a text search (filters by wine name, producer, region, country) and a status dropdown filter.

Drinking window logic

Phased windows split a lot's quantity across multiple statuses. Example: a lot of 6 with phases 3 × 2027–2031 and 3 × 2032–2036 shows as "Drink now: 3, Cellaring: 3" in 2028.

Finance integration

When a purchase price is entered in Add bottle, an entry is written under your finance heading in today's daily note:

## Finance
- [ ] #log/spending 84
    - $84.00 USD #log/spending/alcohol/wine
        - 3 x [[St Hallett Blockhead]] 2021
        - Langtons

The #log/spending total on the root line is updated automatically. Finance logging only fires when a purchase price is present. If you don't want it, leave the purchase price blank.

Settings

Journal and finance settings are inferred on load from the Journals and Finance Tracker plugins if you have them installed. Turn the toggles off to manage the values yourself.

Canonical inventory format

Inventory lives in a wine-inventory fenced block inside each wine note:

```wine-inventory
- vintage: 2021
  lots:
    - lot_id: 2021-a
      qty: 6
      purchase_date: 2025-03-10
      unit_price: 28
      current_price: 32
      shelf: A1
      source: Langtons
      gift: false
      notes: ""
      bottle_size: ""
      windows:
        - qty: 3
          start: 2027
          end: 2031
        - qty: 3
          start: 2032
          end: 2036
```

Markdown is the only source of truth. The plugin cache is derived from the notes at runtime and can be rebuilt at any time with the Rebuild index command.

Privacy

Wine Tracker makes no network requests. All prices, drinking windows and statistics are computed locally from your own notes.

Development

node --check main.js
node --test tests/*.test.js

The plugin is a single self-contained main.js with no bundler or local imports — all logic lives there.

Issues and pull requests welcome at github.com/arangutambo/wine-tracker.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

If you find it useful, you can buy me a coffee.