Cellar Tracker: the ‘doom and gloom narrative’ of wine’s falling consumption is ‘a little overplayed’

According to Cellar Tracker’s CEO, the aptly named Eric LeVine, wine consumption is still in a healthy place, with dry January showing no inroads in the wine community. He talks to Arabella Mileham about the apps’ insights and what it says about today’s collecting, buying and drinking habits. 

He started his career in Microsoft (“When software would crash and you’d get a pop up saying ‘Send error report?’, that was me and two guys, in 1999”) but then got the wine bug after a holiday to Tuscany, started collecting and in 2003, he created Cellar Tracker “as a hobby” for his collection, before sharing it with a few friends.

“My day job was thinking all about gathering literally billions of pieces of data from people about software reliability, so I had a very unique way of thinking about how to structure data,” he explains. “And then as I started building this tool to catalogue my collection and let people post reviews, I realized, ‘Oh, this could be a thing’.”

Fast forward 23 years, and it is definitely ‘a thing’. In 2025 alone, more than 13.6million bottles were added to Cellar Tracker, around 8.3million bottles consumed and more than 683,000 tasting notes generated. These days, people use Cellar Tracker in two ways, he explains. “The core use it as a tool to catalogue and track their own Cellar, but the by-product is the communities it has generated, of around 13 million reviews. So, we’ll get about 10 million unique visitors every year, so the traffic is actually much more worldwide.”

This generates a treasure trove of data. As LeVine explains, the annual Cellar Tracker Insights tracks the most popular and most highly rated wines over the course of the given year, those that generate the most reviews or interactions, as well as members’ favourite finds and pours from the past year.

In its year in review, which looks at the data in aggregate, “we make an effort to pull out the smaller trends that are hiding among the more typical ocean of data,” he explains.

Who’s Who of collectibles

He argues that it used to be “a ‘who’s who’ of very collectible wines, the kind of the things that you would see the mainstream reviewers reviewing”, but in the last twenty years, things have changed.

“I think what we see now is a world of wine that traditional wine reviewers aren’t necessarily reviewing or touching, but that this broad community of people out there is finding.”

This isn’t peculiar to Cellar Tracker on its own, he adds, but due to “the internet in general”.

“It’s Cellar Tracker, it’s Vivino, it’s all of the tools that let you use your phone to dig more broadly and deeply into the world of wine,” he argues. “It just shows that there is more diversity than ever.”

And wine’s diversity is what keeps things exciting, he adds. “The complexity and quirkiness is what makes wine so fun, but I think it also inherently makes it a little less approachable.”

“With wine, traditionally, there have been gatekeepers. You had critics who told you very assertively – both in the UK and then later in the US – ‘this is good, this is bad’, and that, I think again, makes it scary for new people,” he explained. “But now, if anyone has a phone and they have a Cellar Tracker or Vivino – and these things are getting more and more and more powerful –  they can just take a picture of a label or AI can take the opinions of a couple million people and make that approachable to 100 million people. And it knows a little something about you, based on what you’ve liked, so hopefully, that lowers the barriers.”  

This said, he argues that it’s important not to oversimplify things, or dumb them down. “I’ve always resisted the term ‘the democratization’ of wine, because people have traditionally tried to pit the rise of community-based reviewing against professional critics, but I just think they’re different in terms of the wines they cover and the frequency of how they cover them and when they cover them.”

But it also gives the chance to  generate some “fun” data.

“We do a kind of ‘Spotify wrap’ of wines, so we send people their own little customized journey of what new regions, varieties or producers they tried this year for the first time, what as their most highly rated wines,” he said. “I think through technology, hopefully we can bring people in in an approachable way, meet them where they are, and help them evolve and discover and explore more wines at every level.”

Five Insights from Cellar Tracker Insights 2025

Cellar Tracker’s Insight highlight lists of wines, regions, producers to watch and show as well as showing which producers have the largest increase in bottles purchased versus bottles consumed. Sometimes this is what you may expect, sometimes it throw up some curveballs, according to LeVine.

1. The old favourites top the board

As LeVine explains, “year in and year out, there are certain wines that are consistently the most highly rated” – and the top four spots are no surprise – Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche, followed by Salon Champagne Blanc de Blancs Brut, Shafer Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select, and Château d’Yquem. Then comes a classic Napa Cabernet, Spottswoode Cabernet Sauvignon Estate, a surprise to Levine, “as most people would assume Harlan would be the one that popped”. “It’s a well-known wine, but I was quite surprised to see it above 95 points,” he said.

Others in the top ten were “an older” Penfolds Grange, Bodegas Vega-Sicilia Ribera del Duero Único, Château Cheval Blanc, Château Latour Grand Vin, and Château Margaux.

“You’re not generally getting any really huge insights there,” LeVine smiles. “It’s just that’s what collectors are collecting, there are no outliers or anything.”

2.  But there were some surprises

The varieties and blends with the highest average rating in 2025 was somewhat less predictable, LeVine notes. One of the most striking aspects of the insights were Pinot Meunier and Savagnin coming “surprisingly high in the list”. At the top was a red Bordeaux blend, followed by Sémillon-Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Champagne Blend on a par with Nebbiolo, Port Blend and Savagnin, the white variety best known for producing dry, floral and exotic wines in the Jura, closely followed by Pinot Meunier, ahead of Syrah and Chardonnay.

Another surprise was that one of the producers with the biggest increase in bottles consumed in 2025 was a producer from the Cote du Rhone. This region, incidentally, was the tenth biggest region in 2025 with 409k bottles. Top of the list was Napa at 1.83m bottles, followed by Burgundy (1.37m) and Bordeaux (1.20m) with Sonoma County (1m) and Central Coast (669k) ahead of Tuscany (689k) and Piedmont (513k).

3. Dry January is not so dry

Just a few days into February, it’s a relief perhaps that January did not prove that dry. LeVine explains that once the numbers of how many bottles per day were consumed by how many users have been normalized, other than “a couple of little outliers”, the result was a consistent zero. point three or  four bottles per day – including January.

“January is just not low. It’s a normal one [month],” LeVine said, adding that December always sees a big spike in activity, (“actually a shocking spike”), with November up and September “a teeny bit low”.

Whether this is because the app caters for people who are paying enough attention to their wine to catalogue what they’re purchasing and consuming on Cellar Tracker is a moot point – how much do they represent wine collectors versus the general public?

“It’s a few people who are trying to intentionally do it [Dry January], but the numbers don’t show any meaningful trend overall,” he said. “Maybe in the general public and drinking public overall, it happens, but not amongst collectors, and enthusiasm [for it?], no, absolutely not that I can see.”

LeVine feels that the “doom and gloom narrative is a little overplayed” and tools and technology has a place to help them find things that they are more likely to like. “Selectivity isn’t a bad thing, but the data is not bearing out, at least amongst the collector community, that they’re drinking less.”

4. Growing diversity

As already touched on, the insights prove there is more diversity than ever before, not only in where people themselves are based, but also in terms of the regions they’re exploring.

“You’re seeing an explosion of natural wines, but this is just a much longer tail, as the Cellar Tracker database is people collectively are tracking 200 million bottles in people’s cellars,” LeVine notes. Last year alone, more than 14 million new bottles were added, compared to only a million 20 years ago. “So it’s very, very long tail.”

And more and more “non-classic” wine regions are appearing, including Eastern Europe and the UK sparkling wine movement.

Although the most tasted producers all hailed from California (Ridge, Williams Selyem, Turley, Aubert, and Kosta Browne among them), the fifth spot went to an English producer, Simpsons Wine Estate, which LeVine admits came as something of a surprise. As the app is one that is English-language, it has always had a “very, very big following in the UK” according to LeVine.

“It’s always fun to see what something new comes along in a given year,” he added.

5. Growth beyond traditional markets.

Similarly, wines are reaching places they previously didn’t reach. In the US, growth has increased beyond traditional markets such as California, Washington and Oregon. “We’re seeing much more New York and Virginia, a lot of different places,” he explains.

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