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.
• A live card on every wine note. Stock, lots, value and drinking-window status for that wine, with the actions you need on it.
• 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 and onto the wine note itself.
• Queryable from Bases and Dataview. Per-wine rollup properties kept up to date automatically.
• Optional finance logging. If you enter a purchase price, a spending line is written to your daily note.

Installation

Requires Obsidian 1.2.8 or later. Works on desktop and mobile.

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. Required: producer, cuvée, varietal, and either a vintage or the Non-vintage (NV) toggle.

Tick Non-vintage (NV) for NV Champagne and multi-year blends. The vintage is stored as NV and window inference is skipped, since there's no year to anchor a window to — set a window by hand if you want one.

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.

Already own the wine? Use Add lot to existing wine instead, or the Add lot button on the wine note's card — both open this same form with producer, cuvée, varietal, region, country and style already filled, so a restock only needs vintage, quantity and price.

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, and draws that bottle down from whichever drinking window phase it came from, so phases never claim bottles the lot no longer holds
• Zero-qty lots are kept in the note as consumed history, but drop out of the dashboard and the flat inventory — those show current stock only
• Writes a tasting stub under your tasting log marker in today's daily note:

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

The link points at the wine note itself. A tasting logged for a wine you don't own (see Log tasting) is written as plain text rather than a link that would resolve to nothing.

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 — shows the current_price already in the note, or blank. The purchase price is shown alongside for reference.

  There is no price estimator. An earlier version compounded the purchase price by 3–7%/yr from grape and style alone and wrote the result into current_price, which invented valuations that kept appreciating on wines already past their drinking window. current_price is now only ever what you typed. Leave it blank and the cellar is valued at what you paid.

• 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 using your Monthly note date format, so viewing a past month shows the status as it would have been then. Drinking windows are year-granular, so the block is scoped to the note's year rather than its month.

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

All views have a text search (wine name, producer, region, country, style, varietal, shelf) and a status dropdown filter. Views repaint automatically when a wine note changes, so consuming or editing a bottle updates them in place.

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 (Shiraz)]] 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.

The wine note

A wine note carries a wine-plugin-card block just under its title. It renders a live summary of that one wine — bottles in stock, lots, value at cost, and a row per lot with its vintage, shelf, price and a coloured chip per drinking-window phase — plus buttons for Consume, Add lot, Log tasting and Prices & windows.

# St Hallett Blockhead

```wine-plugin-card
```

## Inventory
```wine-inventory
...
```

## Tasting
- 2026-08-14 · 2021 · 4/5 · lot 2021-a — Plush fruit, ready now.

The card is added to new notes automatically, and to older ones the next time the plugin writes to them. Nothing is stored in it — delete the block if you don't want it, and the note still works.

Tastings are appended under ## Tasting as well as to your daily note, so each bottle carries its own drinking record rather than having it scattered across daily notes. Turn that off with Copy tastings to the wine note.

Querying with Bases and Dataview

Both query note properties, so each wine note carries computed rollups, refreshed whenever the index rebuilds:

Point a Base at your wine notes folder and these are all available as columns and filters. They are only written when a value actually changes, so they don't churn your files. Turn them off with Write rollup properties.

The flat inventory note is a plain Markdown table for reading and search — neither Bases nor Dataview can query a Markdown table, so use the properties above for that.

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.

Tests require main.js directly, redirecting the obsidian import to tests/obsidian-stub.js so it loads in bare Node. The pure helpers are re-exported on module.exports.__internals purely for this; Obsidian only reads the default export. Tests therefore exercise the shipping code rather than a copy.

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.