What it does
- Label scanning: one photo or a batch, read by a vision model in under three seconds, with a review step for anything uncertain.
- Shared cellars: a household shares inventory and history; ratings and taste profiles stay personal.
- Voice sommelier: speak the menu and get three picks, only ever from bottles in the cellar.
- Phone and desktop: the same codebase runs as an iOS app, in a TestFlight pilot, and as a desktop web app. The code is Android-ready, but no Android build has been distributed yet.
Since the first release
- What a bottle is worth: market value from US shop listings, and the competition awards it has won.
- Drinking it at the right time: a weekly “drink soon” push notification from the cellar’s drinking windows.
- Personal taste: a taste survey that feeds the voice sommelier, and a tasting journal.
- Buying again: a shared buy-again list that shows the three cheapest shops for each wine.
- Everyday use: undo for changes, and a copy of the cellar that works offline on the phone.
The pilot is with friends and family, with more households invited in October 2026.
AI, engineered like a product feature
- Measured, not assumed. An evaluation set of real label photos with known answers scores every model or prompt change: 13 of 14 correct, 2.7 s median, about 0.4¢ per read.
- Model confidence isn’t trusted blindly. A misread came back at 0.85 confidence, so hard rules gate the result: a producer is required, and a vintage too unless the label says non-vintage.
- The assistant can’t recommend what you don’t own. It only sees short codes for bottles in the cellar, and the server drops anything else.
- Cost control: every AI call is logged and priced, with a monthly allowance per household and alerts at 80% and 100%.
Engineering underneath
Two layers of access control (API membership checks plus Postgres row-level security), a job queue inside Postgres, live updates over server-sent events, and every server-side fetch checked against private network addresses. Production runs as four containers: the database, the API, a background worker and the tunnel connector.
Personal details in the phone screenshots have been changed.
