Most drink windows in InVintory are ours: we work out when a wine should be at its best from its style, region, grapes and vintage year, and we lean on published critic drink windows for that exact wine and vintage wherever we have them.
Where the years on screen come from
Three things can set a drink window, and they apply in this order.
What sets it | When it applies |
Your own edit | Always wins. It sticks through every later update we make to that wine. |
A window we have already worked out for that wine and vintage | When we have critic drink windows, or windows from wine databases and merchant listings we have matched to it, to draw on. |
Our own calculation | Everything else. Style, grapes, region and how strong the vintage was in that region. |
Non-vintage wines start from you
A non-vintage wine has no vintage year to count from, so its clock starts when you got the bottle — the purchase date you entered, or the date you added it. On a non-vintage wine you do not own, the window carries an asterisk, because there it has to assume you bought it today.
When a wine has no window
Some wines show no drink window at all. That usually means the wine was added to our database recently and we have not calculated one for it yet. You can wait for it, enter your own years, or tell us if something looks wrong.
Treat it as a guide
A drink window is an opinion about maturity, not a deadline. Palates differ, storage differs, and plenty of people happily open a wine years either side of ours. If yours disagrees with ours, change it — your years are the ones your collection will use from then on.
Collection → wine → Wine Guide → Drink window → … → How we calculate this
Next steps
Understanding your collection page — how ready to drink, drink soon, hold and past prime are worked out