Cellar Chimp has announced the release of its winery management mobile and desktop app for smaller wineries.
The platform, designed by winemaker and viticulturist Dr Irina Santiago-Brown, began its life as a COVID-19 lockdown project and after ten months of development, it is now available to give smaller winemakers a competitive management solution to that of larger wineries.
Santiago-Brown designed Cellar Chimp to use smartphone cameras and QR codes to label and store all of a winery’s information.
“QR codes have been around for a long time but it was only during lockdown that we realised how useful they could be in the winery,” she said.
“While tape, markers and five colours of chalk usually work, they don’t have a memory and still need to be recorded somewhere. And, tape falls off and chalk smudge.
“When we’re in the winery, we’re not sitting at a PC, we’re working,” DR Santiago-Brown continued, “A mobile is the only way to work efficiently today”.
“Cellar Chimp displays all of your information on any device wherever you are and whenever you need it. Whether you’re in the vineyard, the road, your office or the winery, you can plan, communicate and follow your teams’ work.”
Co-founder Dudley Brown said “Cellar Chimp levels the playing field for all of us ‘chimps’ in the winemaking game”.
Using an easy-to-use interface, Cellar Chimp helps your team capture, record and look up everything they need to do their jobs, according to the app’s co-founders.
Alex Head of Head Wines in the Barossa Valley has been using Cellar Chimp as a beta customer and said “as a one-man operation spread out over two home bases, many different vineyards and two wineries, Cellar Chimp allows me to stay in touch with everything that’s happening just by glancing at my phone”.
“I can keep track of ferments and plan the next day’s work for my team from wherever I am so that I can be in the vineyard making sure I get our fruit at the exact right time.
“When I’m in the winery or cellar, all I do is point my phone at a ferment or barrel and everything I want to know comes up automatically. It’s like having a personal assistant who never sleeps!”
The app not only automates your wine data, winery processes, additions, storage vessel information and history, but also communicates between team members from grape receiving to bottling planning.
It remembers everything from grape tonnages and wine volumes, harvest data, to ferment and malo graphs, lab data, barrel and tank inventories, blending decisions, bottling quantities and dry good requirements in one easy-to-use place. It keeps track of pressing, racking and topping quantities (including spills and the angels share), lees and additions. It even tracks and compares your picking dates over the years by variety and/or block.
To celebrate the launch, Cellar Chimp is offering one-month free subscriptions and discounts on longer subscriptions.
Are you a Daily Wine News subscriber? If not, click here to join our mailing list. It’s free!
