Solera
a wine diary that answers back
people keep corks from bottles that meant something, in a jar on a shelf. this is that jar, and it remembers what was in them. a year later you are in a shop, and it can tell you.
for android · coming to google play · free for five bottles
the loop
one way in, and nothing is rated on the spot
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add
photograph the label, or type it in. ten seconds either way. the camera only fills in the form. it never decides anything by itself.
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waiting
bottles you bought and have not opened. bottles you drank at a friend’s and never said a word about. they wait here. you are at a table with people, and that is a bad moment to stop and decide what you thought.
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at the table
how was it. four answers, marked on the side of a glass like a measure. not four buttons in a row.
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the shelf
it joins the collection. its region fills in on the map. every bottle you rate makes the next answer better.
in the shop
an answer you can read in half a second
“you’ve had this one — october 2025, trieste, with marko. you loved it.”
“probably yes — you’ve liked four wines from puglia, and almost every full-bodied red.”
no score out of a hundred. no stars, no percentage, no crowd. a number pretends to know more than it does, and the crowd has never drunk anything with you. you get the reason instead.
when it has not earned an opinion it says so, in those words: too early to guess.
the map
where you have been drinking
countries fill in as you drink them. more bottles, darker fill. open one and you get its regions, ticked and unticked, with your own bottles under each. not an encyclopedia article about burgundy.
no percentages here either. italy has twenty regions and five hundred appellations, so the same shelf is thirty per cent of one and one per cent of the other. you get a count instead.
the promise
everything you add stays on this phone
no account. no login. nothing is uploaded. not your bottles, not your ratings, not your notes, not your photographs.
the catalogue comes inside the download, so all of it works with no signal. solera opens no connection of its own: the one purchase goes through the play store, which does that talking for it, and nothing else in the app has anywhere to reach.
google play prints an app’s permissions on its listing, so this is checkable rather than something to take on trust. beside the camera and billing you will find network, microphone and storage there. those three arrive inside google’s own camera and label-reading libraries, which are bundled so that reading a label works with the phone in aeroplane mode. solera uses none of the three.
- no account
- no tracking
- no analytics
- no advertising id
- no ads
- no affiliate links
- no crash reporter
you can write the whole diary to a plain file whenever you want. it is yours, so you should be able to walk off with it.
the price
five bottles free, then you buy it once
the first five bottles on your shelf cost nothing. that is enough to put last month’s wine in, get a shelf worth looking at, and stand in a shop and be answered. everything works from the first bottle — the shop check, the map, your year, the file you walk off with. nothing is a preview.
after that you buy solera once, inside the app, and the shelf stops having a size. one purchase, no tiers, and nothing else in the app is for sale. bottles waiting to be opened are free and never counted; the five is the shelf.
while it is free the shelf only fills — a bottle you have kept cannot be thrown away. otherwise five bottles would really be five at a time, which is not a diary. buying it makes the shelf yours to edit.
not a subscription. nothing here runs on a server, so there is no monthly bill to cover, and no reason to charge you rent for a diary you are keeping yourself.