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.

The three tiers

There are three ways to exist on the site, and each one is distinct:

1. Reader — no account. Everything public (wines, producers, posts, events) is already accessible. Most visitors stop here.
2. Registered account — free, self-serve at /register. Adds personal drafts, lets you be added to events you're invited to, opens up Telegram reminders and a linked profile. You can sign up without asking anyone.
3. Contributor access — your own cellar, the ability to publish tasting notes, event hosting. Gated.

How to get contributor access

Contributor access isn't capacity-limited, it's feedback-limited. 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. Two paths in:

• Become a patron. Patrons get contributor access as one of the perks. See the Support page for the subscription options.
• Drop me a line. boris@barberry.io 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, fortification (when applicable), importer, price range, and location. Sort by name, vintage, price, rating, quantity. ⌘K also searches across your cellar alongside everything else.

Bottles on the wine's page

Every wine you own shows a Your Cellar table on its own detail page — one row per bottle you have (or had) of that wine, with its status (available or consumed ), its location, source, purchase date, price, and any private note you left on the bottle. The checkmark consumes the bottle right there; the trash icon removes it. It's the same data as the cellar view, cut by wine instead of by inventory — convenient when you're deciding whether tonight is the night.

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

Every rating carries one of three states: draft, private, or public.

• Draft — only you can read it. Not other participants, not the admin, nobody. Drafts are working thoughts: they stay yours until you say otherwise. Notes typed during a live event start as drafts; so do notes captured on the fly via /drafts/new; so do the blind ones you write before you know what you're drinking.
• Private — only you (and the admin, for reasons of database physics — see the admin-side note below) can read it. This is the default for ad-hoc ratings written outside an event. "Honestly" sometimes means unflattering things about wines your friends brought to dinner; the site protects that by default.
• Public — visible on the wine page, the recent tastings list, event reports. Available to contributors with co-author capability.

Capturing a draft in the moment

Three paths land in the drafts inbox, each for a different rhythm:

• /drafts/new — the "+ Draft" button in the nav is the fastest way in. Tapping it creates a blank draft and drops you straight into the focused editor; no wine picker to answer first, no "Save" button to hunt for. Start typing, tap a score, identify the wine when you're ready. Everything saves to the server as you go. Think of drafts as an inbox for fleeting notes — figure out specifics (what, with whom, where) later.
• Live event page. Still the right place when you're inside a hosted tasting — score + note get attached to the event automatically, and your score feeds the live scoreboard.
• Wine detail page. Write a full rating straight to private/public from the wine's own page when you already know exactly what you're reviewing and don't need a draft stop along the way.

The note editor on all three surfaces supports GitHub-flavoured markdown. Type [ inside a note to search for and link another wine, post, or producer; paste or drop an image to upload it inline.

Place, people, and a bottle

Under the note, a quiet row records the context: when (the tasting date, defaulting to today — tap it to correct a note written up after the fact), where (a venue, a host's home, or just typed-in text), who you tasted with (recently co-tasted people surface first; invent a guest on the spot if they're new), and — once the wine is identified — which bottle it was. The whole row autosaves; there's no Save button.

When you're working through several wines in one sitting, a fresh draft offers a one-tap Same as ... shortcut: if an earlier draft from the same day already has a place and people, tap Use to copy both across. It only shows while the new draft's location and participants are still empty, and quietly steps aside once the draft has context of its own.

The bottle picker ties a draft to a specific bottle from your cellar — linking it marks that bottle consumed, the same as drinking it from the cellar view. Don't have it on the shelf yet? Pick Acquire a new bottle to record one (price, location, source) without leaving the draft; the new bottle is linked automatically. Blind drafts don't show the bottle picker until the wine is identified.

Blind drafts

A draft without a wine is fine. Flip Blind — identify later on the new-draft screen; the wine slot becomes a short label ("Wine 1", "the funky orange") so multiple blind drafts in one session stay distinguishable. Everything else about a blind draft behaves normally — score, note, autosave to the server — except it can't be published. The Publish button flips to Identify to publish until you pick the real wine. Once identified, the blind label is quietly preserved as historical context under the wine name on the draft ("drafted blind as 'Wine 2'").

Identifying a wine from its label (preview)

If an admin has granted you the AI identify capability, you have two new entry points. From the command palette (cmd/ctrl-K), pick Snap a label to capture or upload up to four photos of a bottle's labels — front, back, capsule, importer sticker, whatever's legible. The assistant reads them, looks up matches in the catalog, and offers one of:

• In the archive — the wine is already here. Open it, or start a draft on it.
• A few possibilities — pick which catalog wine matches, or skip and keep the draft blind.
• New to the archive — saves a blind draft with the assistant's best read of the label so the inbox card isn't just "Wine 1". Adding the wine to the catalog properly is a separate slice (coming soon).

The second entry point is on a blind draft itself: alongside the existing Identify button (catalog search) you'll see From photo. Same flow, but it rewrites the current draft instead of creating a new one.

Both photo entries are off by default. Ask an admin if you want them on — the feature is still in preview and we want feedback before opening it up.

The drafts inbox

/profile/drafts is the single list of every unpublished note you own. A red dot on your avatar (and on the Drafts menu item inside) tells you when the pile isn't empty. Opening a solo draft lands you in a focused editor at /drafts/[id] — swipe or arrow-key to slide between drafts without going back to the list. From there, publish, delete, change the wine, or identify a blind one — all inline. Event-linked drafts are marked with a small "event" pill and route straight to the event's live page with the wine preselected; score and sentiment live with the event, not the drafts surface.

Publishing a draft

When a draft is ready, Publish moves it out. Same affordance appears in four places, each for a different moment:

• Live event, My Scores tab. Per-row Publish → next to each draft note — quickest when you're still at the table and the notes are fresh.
• Drafts inbox at /profile/drafts. A row-level Publish → for when you're triaging the pile. Only appears on solo drafts — event-linked drafts publish through the event.
• Focused draft editor at /drafts/[id]. The primary action at the bottom of the slide, next to Delete.
• Wine detail page. Inline on the rating's meta row when you're looking at your own draft. Good for polishing a week later.

Publishing lands on whichever visibility your default_rating_visibility is set to — private if you're a contributor, typically public if you're a co-author. It's one-way: there's no un-publish to draft. If you want to retract a published note, flip it to private via the wine-page edit form instead.

Event drafts also promote automatically when the host clicks Finalize Scores at the end of a tasting. Each participant's drafts (notes and score-only entries) move into their notebook so nothing stays stranded in the drafts pile. The target visibility is a separate preference: Account → Publishing → "Visibility for event drafts". The default is private — your event impressions stay personal unless you explicitly opt them into the public timeline. Co-authors who'd rather have event drafts follow their general default can set the preference to Same as default. Reopening scoring later only unlocks the score field; already-promoted notes keep their visibility.

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.
• Fortification. None / Fortified / Mistelle / Aromatised. For Madeira, Port, Sherry, vermouth, Barolo Chinato, and similar. Picking anything other than None reveals optional cask age, bottling date, and release label fields underneath.
• 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.

Editing producers directly

The inline "Create" path on the Add wine form is the fastest way to add a producer you just need for a single bottle. For anything more - a full write-up, country and region links, correcting an existing entry - use Add producer from the Producers page, or the "Edit producer" link on a producer's page (visible on your own non-approved entries, and on everything if you're an admin).

The producer form asks for the display name, a short description (shown in listings and meta), one or more countries, one or more regions, and a long-form markdown write-up. Producers created this way follow the same approval queue as wines.

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.
• Your tasting notes and ratings. Drafts are author-only until you publish; private ratings are visible to you and the admin; public ratings show up on the wine page and recent-tastings list. If a rating is attached to an event you attended, your score shows up on the event report next to your name — the note doesn't unless you've published it.
• 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 the admin can see it (settlement requires it).

A note on the admin side

I'm the admin. The database is mine, which means — technically — I could look at anything in it. I don't, and more concretely: I've deliberately chosen not to build any admin UI that would let me see what's in another convive's cellar, or read private tasting notes, or browse anyone's personal pages beyond what the ordinary views allow. Drafts go one step further: the read policy in the database itself excludes drafts from any query that isn't the author's, so even I don't see them through any view. The temptation isn't so much resisted as removed at the root.

There are two reasons. The first is the obvious one: your cellar and notes are yours. The second is more selfish — we drink together, and I want to be surprised when someone pulls a blind bottle out of a bag. A cellar I've already snooped at isn't a blind tasting, it's a guessing game with an unfair advantage.

The one exception is the ledger, which I have to be able to see in order to settle with you after events. Everything else stays behind a door I haven't built a key for.

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.