Quick answer
- Add Wine, then Scan Label, then photograph the front label.
- Choose the purpose: Add to Cellar, Add to Wishlist or Add Tasting Note.
- Review the recognised fields before saving. Anything the scan could not read is flagged.
The three ways to add a wine
Scanning is the fastest, but it is not the only route:
- Scan Label: photograph the label for recognition.
- Search Database: find the wine by name, producer or vintage. Better for a wine you know is already in the catalogue, or a bottle whose label is damaged.
- Manual Entry: type the details yourself. The fallback when the wine is obscure enough that neither of the above finds it.
Getting a good scan
Recognition reads the text on the label and matches it against the Vinius wine catalogue. That means the photo quality matters more than the lighting looks like it should:
- Fill the frame with the front label, straight on rather than at an angle.
- Avoid glare across the label. A hard flash on a glossy label reads worse than soft indirect light.
- Wipe condensation off a bottle straight out of the fridge.
- For a label with the vintage on the neck rather than the front, expect to type the vintage yourself.
Choosing what you are doing with it
Before the details step, Vinius asks what you want to do. Choose deliberately, because this decides whether the bottle affects your stock:
- Add to Cellar: you own it. Records quantity, storage and price, and it counts towards stock and valuation.
- Add to Wishlist: you want to buy it. Saves the wine with a priority, an estimated price and your note.
- Add Tasting Note: you drank it. Records your rating and notes.
See Favourites, wishlist and tasted wines for the difference in practice.
Reviewing the scan result
The result screen shows what was recognised: wine name, winery, style, country, region, subregion, appellation and vintage.
Fields the scan could not determine are marked missing from scan. Vintage is the usual one, because vintages are often printed small, on the neck, or not at all.
You cannot continue until the required fields are filled. Vinius names exactly which ones are outstanding rather than refusing vaguely. From here you can:
- Edit Details to correct or complete fields
- Try Again to rescan, worth doing if the winery came back wrong
- Enter Manually to abandon the scan and type everything
Correct a wrong winery rather than letting it save. Winery is the field that determines whether your catalogue stays clean.
Duplicate matches
If the wine looks like something already in your catalogue, Vinius says so and shows the candidates: similar wine already in your catalog.
- Use this links your bottle to the existing wine. This is almost always the right choice, and it is what keeps one wine from becoming five near-identical records.
- Add new anyway creates a separate wine. Use it only when none of the candidates is genuinely the wine in your hand, for example a different vintage or a different bottle size that is not offered.
The same check runs on winery names, so a producer does not get duplicated by a spelling variation.
Completing a cellar entry
For Add to Cellar you complete the inventory details. Bottle size, quantity and price including VAT are required. Storage location is optional at this point, but filling it in is what makes a bottle findable later. See Managing storage.
There is a Simple and a Detailed mode. Simple gets the bottle recorded; detailed opens subregion, appellation and grape composition.
Completing a tasting note
For Add Tasting Note you can record a rating, notes, location and whether to share it publicly. Share publicly is on by default, so a note you save from here appears in the community feed attributed to you. Switch it off before saving to keep the note private.
The wine and the note are saved together in one step. If you want a full structured assessment rather than a quick rating, switch to detailed, or add it later from the wine's detail page. See Tasting notes and ratings.
If scanning is unavailable
Some roles can view wine information without adding to it. If scanning, searching and manual entry are all blocked, that is your organization role rather than a fault. Ask an owner or manager to adjust it.