For contributors

What this is

barberry.io started as one person's wine notebook and, for most of its life, that's exactly what it was - I wrote, you read. The plumbing is now there for you to keep a notebook of your own under the same roof: your cellar, your tasting notes, your scores, your analytics, all sitting alongside mine rather than mixed in with them.

This guide covers what you can do once you've been given contributor access. If you're reading it because you're curious - you're in the right place, but you'll also want the For readers guide first. That one explains what the site is and how to find your way around.

How to get in

Contributor access is invite-only. It isn't a capacity thing - it's a feedback thing. I'd rather grow this slowly with people who will actually tell me what's broken than fling the doors open and lose the signal. If you'd like in, drop me a line with a sentence or two about what you'd want to use it for. The price of entry is your opinion: use it, break it, and tell me what's missing.

Once you're in, you'll see the same shell as before with a few more affordances unlocked - "Add bottle" on your cellar, "Add wine" in a few places, edit buttons on wines you can edit, your own analytics on the profile.

Your cellar

Your cellar lives at /profile/cellar. Adding a bottle is the main gesture. Every bottle carries three things worth remembering:

• The wine. Picked from the catalogue. If the wine isn't in the catalogue yet, you can add it from the same dialog without leaving what you're doing. See Adding wines below.
• The price. What you paid for this specific bottle, in whatever currency you paid in. This is per-bottle, not per-wine - the same Champagne bought in Kyiv and in Paris will happily carry two different prices.
• The location. Two levels. The primary is a categorical label you'll reuse a lot: "Home Cellar", "Kitchen rack", "Wine fridge", "Komora", whatever makes sense for your setup. The detail is the specific slot within it - "shelf 11", "top drawer", "case #3". Both are free text; the site doesn't try to be clever about what you mean. Pick conventions you'll stick to and your analytics will reward you.

Browsing and filtering

The cellar view defaults to a grid of bottle images. Switch to a table if you prefer dense rows. Filters across the top narrow by origin, grape, producer, colour, type, sweetness, importer, price range, and location. Sort by name, vintage, price, rating, quantity. ⌘K also searches across your cellar alongside everything else.

Consuming a bottle

When you open a bottle, click Consume. You'll be asked for a score (optional), a tasting note (optional), a date (defaults to today), and a venue. If the bottle is reserved for an event, the event gets attached automatically. The bottle leaves your inventory; the rating lives on the wine's page. If you consumed by accident, there's an undo.

Batch operations

Adding ten bottles of the same wine? The dialog has a quantity field. Each bottle gets its own ID, its own location slot, and its own price if you want to differ them. Consuming a batch gives you one dialog that creates one rating and decrements the count by one.

Reservations

Bottles can be reserved for an upcoming event you've signed up for. A reserved bottle stays in your cellar count but is marked unavailable so you don't accidentally drink it on a Tuesday night.

Rating wines and writing tasting notes

The rating is the short end. The note is the long end. Both end up on the wine's detail page under your name, dated, stamped with the venue or event if there was one.

What a rating looks like

Scores here are personal - the five-point scale with two decimals described in the For readers guide. You can leave a rating without a note or a note without a score, though the most useful ratings carry both. A favourite flag (the heart) is separate from the score - it captures "I would recognise this anywhere and I want to remember that I loved it" rather than an absolute number.

Privacy

By default, your tasting notes are private. Only you and I can read them. This is deliberate: most notes are written quickly and honestly, and "honestly" sometimes means unflattering things about wines your friends brought to dinner. The site should protect that by default.

Per-rating visibility is already in the schema - there's a private / public flag on every rating - and in the future I'll probably let certain contributors opt into publishing their notes so everyone can read them the way you read mine. I'm still thinking about the shape (opt in per rating? default public for trusted contributors? co-authored posts instead?) and would rather ship it properly than half-ship it early. If you have opinions here, that's exactly the feedback I want.

Editing

You can edit or delete your own ratings from the wine's page. Edits don't leave a visible audit trail, but they do update timestamps, so if you've revised a score three months later the date reflects the revision.

Adding wines the site doesn't know about

If the wine you want to add a bottle of isn't in the catalogue, use Add wine - either from the link next to the cellar header or from the "Add a new wine" option inside the Add Bottle dialog.

The form asks for:

• Producer - picker with type-ahead. If the producer isn't in the catalogue either, type a new name and pick "Create".
• Name and vintage. Vintage is optional for NV wines.
• Colour, carbonation, sweetness. Single-select chips.
• Grapes. Multi-select with synonyms - "Spätburgunder" surfaces Pinot Noir, "Tokay" surfaces Pinot Gris. If you pick a synonym the catalogue stores the canonical name.
• Origin. A country/region/appellation tree. Pick at whatever depth you know - "France" is fine if that's all you have.
• Alcohol, volume.

New wines go through a light approval queue. The queue mostly exists to stop the same Chardonnay being added eleven times with eleven different spellings. In practice most entries pass through in a day or two. Once approved, the wine appears in the public catalogue and can be rated by anyone who's had it.

Your pages

Your own pages live under /profile. The avatar in the top-right is the fastest way in. The top of /profile gives you an editorial overview - upcoming events, stats, top-rated wines, activity, consumption trends, favourite venues, recent events, latest wines.

Tabs along the top take you to the individual views:

• Wines - every wine you've tasted, with filters that mirror the main catalogue.
• Events - events you've been to or signed up for.
• Analytics - deeper charts: rating distributions, vintage histograms, grape breakdowns, compatibility with other convives.
• Ledger - event charges, settlements, top-ups, running balance.

Cellar analytics

/profile/cellar/analytics is a separate view from the analytics tab above, because the data is different. It answers questions like: how much am I spending per year, what do I have too much of, what's been sitting there untouched, what's my most-represented country, how does the cellar's value distribute across locations. Because every bottle carries a real price and a real location, the charts mean something.

What's private, what's visible, what you'll see on event reports

Short version:

• Your cellar. Private. Only you see it. Admins can see it but don't as a rule.
• Your tasting notes and ratings. Private by default (see above). Unless a rating is attached to an event you attended, in which case the /score/ shows up on the event report next to your name - the /note/ doesn't.
• Your profile overview, stats, analytics. Private. Visible only to you.
• Your name and avatar. Public - they appear on event reports, wine pages (under co-tasters), and in any event you're signed up for.
• Wines you add to the catalogue. Public once approved. The catalogue belongs to everyone; the notes about it belong to their authors.
• Your ledger. Private. Only you and I see it.

What's coming

Two things I'm building but haven't opened up yet:

• Hosts. Trusted contributors will be able to host their own tastings on the site - create events, manage signups, settle up through their own ledger.
• Live rating during events. Scoring a wine on your phone while it's being poured, rather than the morning after. Works internally. Not public yet.

Both will get their own sections in this guide when they ship. This page will stay current with what the site actually does.

Get in touch

Questions, bugs, feature requests, strong opinions about the default visibility of tasting notes - send them to boris@barberry.io or find me on Telegram. The whole point of contributor access right now is that you have the signal and I don't.