Small business takeaway:
- CellarTracker’s AI push shows how the wine-collecting app scaled by turning hard-won community knowledge into customer-facing features—transforming unstructured, user-generated content into digestible, crowdsourced guidance that helps people make faster, more confident purchase decisions. Its ‘Will I like this?’ feature reinforces that business recommendations earn trust when the rationale is clear. And the startup’s freemium-to-paid subscription model shows how to prove value in small doses, then charge for advanced capabilities that save customers time and reduce decision risk.
Eric LeVine has a virtual vineyard’s worth of data about wine, and he’s using artificial intelligence to help make all that information more accessible to consumers.
A former Microsoft Engineer, LeVine started working on a tech startup of his own in 2003: a platform for serious wine collectors to keep track of their stock. CellarTracker, which he launched to the public in 2004, has since grown to about 10 million users around the world, with $21 billion worth of wine tracked.
“I just grew the business organically for almost two decades as a very niche tool for collectors to catalog their collections,” LeVine, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of CellarTracker, said in an interview with CO—.
Along the way these users have shared a wealth of information about the wines they’ve tasted in the millions of user-generated tasting notes that have been stored in the database. Now, LeVine is combining the consumer data that CellarTracker has collected with the analytic power of AI to create new tools that anyone can use to explore the world of wine, whether they are an occasional wine drinker or a serious collector.
“I decided there was a lot of potential that I wasn’t achieving, in terms of making the data more useful for the people who are on the platform,” he said.
For example, AI can concisely summarize the opinions—often numbering in the hundreds—that users have shared about each bottle of wine they’ve tasted.
In addition, CellarTracker, which has both website and mobile app versions, recently added a food-pairing tool to help users decide what wine to have with a meal, or vice-versa.
Another feature LeVine called “Will I like this?” will analyze a user’s history of reviews and purchases to determine if a particular wine might suit their preferences, and why or why not.
“The questions we look to answer are very simple,” he said. “Will I like this wine? What's a fair price to pay? Is it going to pair well with what I have? Or, if I have a wine already, when should I drink it?”
The collective wisdom of the oenophiles who have used the app for the past 20-plus years is the heart of the platform’s information engine...And now AI will enable CellarTracker to expand upon that with information gleaned from other sources as well.
Some see a wine rebound on the horizon as ‘35- to 40-year-old consumers move deeper into wine-friendly life stages’
Wine consumption in the United States has been declining as many consumers as possible, especially younger demographics, have cut down on their alcohol consumption overall or shifted toward ready-to-drink cocktails. While U.S. wine sales fell by 6% in 2025, according to the International Wine and Spirits Record (ISWR), some industry observers expect a rebound in the next few years.
“The demographic drag that has defined the past several years will begin to ease as the population of 35- to 40-year-old consumers moves deeper into wine-friendly life stages,” said Rob McMillan, Executive VP and Founder, Silicon Valley Bank Wine Division, in his State of the Wine Industry 2026 report.
Also potentially boding well for wine recommendation platforms such as CellarTracker, consumers are becoming increasingly discerning about the alcoholic beverages they choose to purchase, according to the ISWR.
“Consumers are becoming more selective about where they allocate their alcohol spending, increasingly evaluating purchases based on their own price-to-quality ratio,” said Marten Lodewijks, IWSR Managing Director and President.
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Chatting with the CellarTracker app using AI
In addition to the other new features, CellarTracker has also added an AI-driven function called CellarChat that enables users to converse with the app, such as to suggest wines from a person’s collection that would pair well with specific dishes.
“You can go back and forth and debate with it,” said LeVine.” If it suggests something, you could say, ‘How about something red instead of white?’”
The collective wisdom of the oenophiles who have used the app for the past 20-plus years is the heart of the platform’s information engine, he said. And now AI will enable CellarTracker to expand upon that with information gleaned from other sources as well. For example, the technology will be able to research new vintages of wine that have not yet been reviewed by CellarTracker users, by tapping into additional information and scouring reviews of other recent vintages via AI.
CellarTracker is also working toward using AI to create tools to help restaurant patrons select a wine from a list.
CellarTracker primarily uses Microsoft Azure, the cloud-based computing service, for its technology needs, which allows it to access the OpenAI engines and other AI platforms that CellarTracker uses for its AI needs, while also protecting its own proprietary data.
As he has grown the company, LeVine has turned down several buyout offers from venture capital companies. The company was self-funded until 2020, he said, and he still retains a majority ownership share. LeVine has recently taken on some minority investors, however, in part to help develop the new AI tools.
“Most of our engineering investment over the last year has been focused on how we can use AI in more ambitious and more overt ways to help people when they’re looking at a wine in our database,” LeVine said.
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CellarTracker subscribers pay for increased functionality, with renewal rates nearing 90%
Although he does not disclose specific details about the company’s financial performance, LeVine said its subscriber base has tripled in the past few years.
LeVine has built the business around a subscription model in which users can access some basic tools for free, or they can purchase a subscription that offers more functionality. Currently, paid subscriptions start at $40 per year, or $4.99 per month through the Apple Store, but the app suggests that users voluntarily pay more based on the number of bottles they have in their collections—up to $500 per year for those with collections numbering 2,500 bottles or more.
“We encourage people to sign up for a free trial, where they can experience all the features and then they decide for themselves whether they want to transition to a paid subscription or not,” said LeVine.
The summarization of wine-tasting notes will be among the free offerings, for example, but the use of CellarChat will require a paid subscription.
“Our goal is to surface enough [functionality], so people understand the value that's there,” LeVine said. “We are a pure consumer subscription business, but we also feel very strongly that CellarTracker should be the best free product available.”
The company has historically had a subscription renewal rates above 90%, he said.
“Generally if people pay for us twice, they’re going to keep on doing it,” said LeVine.
In addition, because many users are older, very serious wine collectors, CellarTracker offers an earlier version of the app called CT Legacy that retains the original features that these longtime users favor as a tool to track their collections.
“We’re at the point where 70% of people are using the new app, but we’ve had to win them over because they’re so used to the way the old app works, and they really like it,” LeVine said.
“Historically it was a productivity tool for real wine geeks, wine collectors,” he said. “But we recognize we’re at a point now—and the technologies are at a point—where we can be for anyone who is interested in or curious about wine.”
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