CellarWineSoftware.com

Between May 2000 and May 2001, I was working in Paris, France. So, it's easy to understand how my interest in wine became "So" important to me that I began buying bottles and bottles of great Bordeaux wines to bring back home with me.

Now, since I also had to start managing the cellar I was rapidly building, I looked for and tested several software packages on the net, both commercial, shareware and freeware. Needless to say, I was mostly disappointed by the "oldish" look they all had and by their poor set of features and/or customization possibilities...

Until I downloaded Cellar!, which still had this "oldish" look but at least, offered some very good features and lots of customization possibilities. When I contacted Art for a few technical questions and comments, he was in the very sad position of having lost his programmer, and not being able to address complex technical issues about the software. Now, I've been in the software programming business for more than 10 years now, I've written several programs in the past, and I've always had the need to build tools to help everyone in specific areas, so... The rest you already know. Art and I became friends and begun a long journey to fully rewrite Cellar! to its new state, with a modern look, modern set of built-in Internet features (thank you Bryan!), and even more customization possibilities, hoping to become the reference in wine-related software and striving to make it better day after day.

Now, for a quick plug... The name SIGLR Inc. that you can see as author of Cellar! is my own little company. It stands for (in French): Services Informatiques GLR Inc. and "GLR" means Guy LaRochelle, which is, huh... me! I'm a professional developer consultant in the Quebec (Canada) area who's always looking for new opportunities. My company's home page is www.siglr.com.

Having completed building a small wine cellar in my basement, I started to populate it. Once I was over 100 bottles, I found it hard to remember what I had in there! Off I went to scour the 'net for wine cellar software. I figured someone had to have developed something! I came across Cellar! in my search. I followed Art's advice and tried other competing products. I found that Cellar! was the best thing out there.

After I sent Art email about some suggested improvements, he suckered me into joining the beta testing team for "the next big thing". So, I set off to find as many bugs as I possibly could! I guess that I pestered Art and Guy enough to get their attention. During one of our email conversations, we struck up a thread about Internet features. I offered to do the coding, and the rest is history!

I'm grateful that Art and Guy accepted me into the Cellar! team, even at a fairly late period of the development. I have to say that I'm quite proud of what we've done!

From Bryan and Guy: April 8, 2008 was a very sad date for us and all of Cellar!'s and Strat's Place community, as Art passed away. We will continue to honor his memory and Cellar! will remain his original idea, a great idea. Here's the original "About us" paragraph about himself.

In 1995, I finally got the bug to organize my wine cellar and I went searching for software that would do the trick for me. I actually purchased two programs at the time and found that neither of them really did what I wanted. Probably what frustrated me the most is that they required me to adapt to "their" method of tracking wine, and I could not modify this. Thus, Cellar! was born.

So, with the aid of a programmer, I came up with the architecture for the program and he coded it into existence. From the beginning I knew that we wanted Cellar! to truly reflect the needs and requirements of our users and thus we continually sought feedback that resulted in many upgrades to the program. Then, without warning, the programmer decided to go off to something else and unfortunately left me with very sketchy and incomplete documentation about the code. I had to take it upon myself to reinvent the program.

I had the good fortune of having one of our users send me an e-mail (candidly complaining about some things in the program) and from that e-mail sprang the friendship between Guy and myself. Guy is a professional programmer and wine lover ... what a great combination! He agreed to join the Cellar! team and had undertaken the task of completely rewriting the program in the latest technology with a completely new architecture.

During the creation of version 3.1 we had an international beta team of wine enthusiasts testing the program for us. One of the things we wanted to add to Cellar! was full Internet interactivity. We mentioned this to our Beta group and this enthusiastic young man named Bryan raised his hand and said ... "Hey .. that's what I do for a living" ... so Guy and I quickly brought him into the Cellar! fold and the result is the amazing Internet interactivity that is now a part of Cellar!

The Cellar! team lives by the credo that "All of this should be fun ... and if we sell enough copies to buy more wine ... that's great!"

The result of this great partnership is that on October 13, 2001 we released the all new version 3.1 of Cellar! with features that truly set the standards by which wine software will be compared.

One small shameless plug ... in 1995 Art and Betsy also formed the noncommercial website Strat's Place, where they could share their love of Wine, Gardening and the Arts. This small personal site has grown into one that has been recognized worldwide with over 500 megabtyes of wine reference material and tens of thousands of visitors each month.

Art Stratemeyer