If you've kept your wine collection in CellarTracker for any length of time, you've probably thought about exporting it. Maybe to back it up. Maybe to value your collection for insurance. Maybe to migrate to another tool. Maybe just to know you own a copy of your own data.
Most users who try the export discover something surprising: a lot of what they thought they were tracking in CT doesn't actually come down with the file. Storage locations, purchase prices, drinking windows you customized, per-bottle notes — these are either absent from the export, hidden behind a paid tier, or mishandled in ways that don't become clear until you open the CSV.
This guide walks through the export step by step: what's in the file, what isn't, and what your options are once you have it.
Four common reasons collectors export, in roughly the order people hit them:
There's a fifth reason worth naming: owning your own data. CT is a wonderful service, but services come and go. A local backup is independence.
Quick housekeeping that takes 30 seconds and most CT users have never looked at: by default, your cellar is visible to other CT members. They can browse your profile and see your bottles, counts, and notes.
This is fine if you want it that way — CT's community features are part of the appeal — but worth a deliberate choice rather than an accidental default. Go to My Profile → Privacy Settings. Five questions, mostly self-explanatory. For a fully-private cellar, set every dropdown to "No one" and check "Hide my count of bottles from other users."
This doesn't affect your export. It affects what's visible to other CT members while you still have the account active. Worth doing now if you've never reviewed it.
The export itself is genuinely simple. Three steps plus a download.
Step 1. Sign into your account at cellartracker.com.
Step 2. From your cellar list, click Export in the top toolbar (between Print and Share).
Step 3. A dialog opens with two settings worth checking:
Step 4. Click Export. CT generates a CSV file and your browser downloads it. Filename will be something like cellar_yourusername_2026-05-03.csv.
That's it. You now have your inventory in a portable file.
Open the CSV in Excel or Numbers (there's an encoding caveat we'll get to). You'll see 59 columns and one row per unique wine in your cellar. Six broad categories of data:
Wine identification. Each wine gets CT's internal iWine ID, plus Type, Color, Category (Dry, Sweet, Distilled), Vintage, Producer, Wine name, and Designation. The iWine ID matters if you ever re-import to CT — it's how CT's database matches your row to its master record.
Geography. Country, Region, SubRegion, Appellation, plus a rolled-up "Locale" string. The granularity is impressive: a Pauillac wine arrives as Country=France, Region=Bordeaux, SubRegion=Médoc, Appellation=Pauillac. CT clearly cares about geography.
Inventory at the wine level. Currency, Value, Price, TotalQuantity, Quantity, Pending. Note the granularity — this is how many bottles of a unique wine you own, not data about specific physical bottles. We'll come back to that.
Varietal. Varietal and MasterVarietal. For Bordeaux blends, expect "Red Bordeaux Blend" in both. For varietally-pure wines, expect "Nebbiolo" / "Nebbiolo" or similar.
Critic scores. This is where CT's depth shows. Thirteen critic publications get exported, each with a score column and a URL column linking to the source. Wine Advocate, International Wine Cellar, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast — joined by nine other publications ranging from Burgundy-specific to Pacific-Northwest-focused. The full list reflects 20 years of accumulated columns; some publications are mainstream and current, others are niche or have been inactive for years. CT's export preserves them all.
Community sentiment. LikeVotes, LikePercent, LikeIt — aggregate community sentiment for the wine.
Personal data. PNotes (your private notes), PScore (your score), CNotes (count of community notes — just a count, not the actual notes).
Drinking windows. BeginConsume, EndConsume, WindowSource. There's a catch with this one — see below.
Now the four findings that surprise most users.
This is the largest gap, and the one most collectors don't realize until they look.
CT's add-bottle flow lets you record cost, purchase date, delivery date, store you bought from, location in your cellar, bin number, per-bottle notes, and per-purchase notes. None of these are in the export. Not as a paywalled column. Not as a separate Individual Bottles mode. They're not in the export menu at all.
If you've used CT to track where each wine came from, what you paid, or how your physical cellar is organized — that data stays inside CT. The export gives you the catalog of wines you own, not the inventory of bottles you own.
This is a 20-year-old design decision showing through. CT was built as a community wine database first, with inventory tracking layered on top. The export reflects the database half.
The columns exist — BeginConsume, EndConsume, WindowSource — but they hold CT's null sentinel value of 9999 for free accounts. Drinking-window customization is a paid CT feature. The values you see when you click "Show Drinking Window" on your cellar list are pulled live from community averages each time; they're never stored to your account, so they don't appear in the export.
Paid CT subscribers who manually set drinking windows on their bottles will see those values export normally. Free-tier users see only 9999 even on wines where the UI shows a community window.
The CNotes column tells you how many people have written tasting notes for a wine (126 people for the 2015 Château Lynch-Bages, for example). The actual text of those notes doesn't export. Same for individual ratings — you get aggregate Community score and Like percent, not individual contributors. Your own private notes (PNotes) and score (PScore) do export if you've written them.
If part of CT's value to you is the depth of community tasting notes, those notes live on CT and stay on CT.
Open the file in Excel or Numbers and accented producer names render fine — Château, Médoc, Pérignon all display correctly. But pipe the file through any modern UTF-8-expecting tool — Python pandas without encoding='latin-1', paste into Google Sheets, most CSV-to-database imports — and accented characters become replacement characters: "Ch�teau Lynch-Bages."
Worth knowing if you plan to process the file programmatically. The fix is one line: declare the encoding when opening the file. The error message you'll get if you don't is rarely helpful.
Three common paths once you have the file:
Path 1 — Spreadsheet analysis. Open in Excel or Numbers and you can do most things CT itself doesn't: regional breakdowns, drinking-window expirations, total cellar value at last-known prices (if you have current values from elsewhere). Best for one-off questions and DIY analysis. Limitations: you'll need to maintain valuations manually, and any per-bottle detail beyond what exports stays locked in CT.
Path 2 — Migration to a tool that handles the inventory and valuation gaps. Several wine-collection tools accept CT exports as input. Cellar IQ — the platform behind this article — imports CT exports directly, adds live secondary-market valuations, tracks gain/loss against cost basis, and includes a cellar-aware AI sommelier. Other options exist; pick whichever matches what you need.
One important note before you migrate anywhere: CT bulk import is harder than CT export. Importing into CT requires emailing your spreadsheet to support@cellartracker.com and waiting one to two days for human processing, followed by hours of manual mapping (CT's own estimate is 4.5 to 6 hours for a 3,000-bottle cellar). So if you migrate away and later change your mind, plan for lead time.
Path 3 — Backup-only. Save the file. Update it quarterly. Don't do anything else with it until you need to. Years of inventory work, preserved against the day you need it. Costs nothing, takes five minutes.
Most collectors end up combining paths — backup plus spreadsheet is common; backup plus migration is common as a one-time event. There's no wrong answer.
The export pulls live from your account at the moment you click Export. Whatever's in your cellar at that second is what comes down.
No. CT doesn't offer scheduled or programmatic exports. You re-trigger manually whenever you want a fresh file.
The default Wines view exports your current cellar. To include consumed bottles, switch your view filter to "All Wines" or "Consumed" before exporting. The same column constraints apply.
The export handles spirits — Type=Spirits, Category=Distilled, Color=Other. Wine-specific columns (Varietal, Region, Appellation) get auto-filled with whisky-equivalent values that may not match how you'd describe the spirit. Drinking-window columns are blank for spirits, as expected.
Yes, but as noted above, CT bulk import is an email-and-wait process plus manual mapping work. Plan for one to two days of lead time at minimum.
CellarTracker's export is a 20-year-old artifact, and it shows. The wine catalog and critic data are exhaustive — possibly the best wine database export available anywhere. The bottle inventory data, the part most collectors care about most, isn't there.
Knowing the gaps before you export saves frustration. Knowing where to take the file next is the harder question. Whatever you choose — spreadsheet, migration tool, backup-only — the most important step is the first one: download the file, save it somewhere safe, and keep a copy of your own data.