I had big plans for today – I was going to get caught up on Quicken, wine bookkeeping, refill the wine refrigerator, and work on the High Holidays honors for Shir Hadash.

I got caught up on Quicken and put the wines we bought yesterday into CellarTracker, but the rest of the plans will have to wait.

I wrote a program a while ago to help me pick which wines to move into the wine refrigerator (based on how far along in the drinking window a wine is and how many bottles I have of it), but I noticed that the list showed the same wine in several places. I’d reworked the program a few months ago to take the inventory information I get from CellarTracker and put it into a simple sqlite3 database to figure out which bottles to move. It seemed to work well, but today I realized that CellarTracker returns the information in order of acquisition, so that if I bought the same wine a few times, it wouldn’t be consolidated.

It should be easy to consolidate the data in the database – all it would need is a few GROUP BY clauses in my query. I looked at the statement I was using to query the database:

select
  type,
  ready,
  whereitis,
  b.label,
  beginconsume,
  endconsume
from
  (
    select
      min(n, n * (now - bc) / (ec - bc)) as ready,
      label,
      beginconsume,
      endconsume
    from
      (
        select
          count(*) as n,
          julianday(beginconsume || '-01-01') as bc,
          julianday(date(endconsume || '-12-31')) as ec,
          beginconsume,
          endconsume,
          julianday('now') as now,
          vintage || ' ' || wine as label,
          type
        from
          wines
        group by
          label
      )
    order by
      ready
  ) r
  inner join (
    select
      type,
      vintage || ' ' || wine as label,
      location,
      location || ' ' || bin as whereitis
    from
      wines
  ) b on b.label = r.label
where
  ready > 0
order by
  ready desc;

and I realized that it would be a whole lot easier to rewrite the logic in simple Python than it would be to figure out how to fix the query.

So I did.

Doing the work in Python may mean that the program runs slower than doing it in the database – on the other hand, I only run the program once a month or so, and it only takes a couple of seconds when I do run it. And next time, I might be able to figure out what I’m doing!

One of our favorite local wineries, Silvertip Vineyards, is closing down and selling their inventory at half-price. They’ve been holding sales and tasting events at the winery, deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, every month for the past few months – today was the first time we’ve been in the area for one of those events.

Going into the Santa Cruz mountains on a Saturday afternoon is always a challenge because of beach traffic. Silvertip was kind enough to open at 9 – we didn’t leave the house nearly 10, but that still put us onto Highway 17 well before it got crowded.

We enjoyed the tasting and bought a couple of cases of wine; by the time we were finished, it was late enough to go to Silver Mountain and Burrell School and pick up our shipments there, too.

As we drove home, we saw how packed and slow 17 South was; I’m happy not to have had to contend with all the beach-goers.

Silvertip will probably have monthly sales on the 3rd Saturday for the rest of the year; they also ship, and if you’re a local, they may be able to deliver or arrange to be open for a pickup at a more convenient time. I’ve really enjoyed their wine – and at half-price, it’s even better.