I build Sommo on my own, in London, and the wine cellar is the part I think about most. Not because cataloguing bottles is hard. Plenty of apps do that. The hard part is the question every collector actually asks, standing in front of the rack on a Friday night: which one of these is ready, and which one will I regret opening too soon?
This post explains the reasoning behind the estimate, how to read storage and tasting context alongside it, and where the dates stop being useful evidence.
The problem with a single date
Most “when to drink” advice gives you one number. Drink by 2030. The trouble is that no honest person can print a date on a bottle, because a drinking window is not a deadline. A wine has a few years where it starts becoming interesting, a stretch where it sings, and a long slow decline after that. Squashing all of that into one date throws away the most useful information you have. (The free drinking window checker on this site gives you the quick, no-signup version of the same idea.)
For an age-worthy wine, the window has four reference points: when it starts drinking well, when it enters its peak, when that peak fades, and when it slips past its best. Read the timeline as a guide to planning, with room for bottle variation and your own preferences.
That much is table stakes. The interesting part is everything that bends the window away from the textbook.
Layer one: an estimate, grounded
The starting point is Sommo’s own analysis of the wine. Sommo runs on proprietary wine-tuned AI built and owned by us, checked against a maintained wine library so the producers and regions it talks about are real. You can read the longer version of that system on the about page.
For a drinking window, the model reasons about the things that actually drive ageing: grape structure, tannin and acidity, region, the vintage conditions, producer style, and winemaking. It returns the four-point window plus a confidence level, and on each bottle’s page it adds vintage intelligence: how strong the growing year was, what character to expect from it, and any notable conditions. A confident wine gets a tighter window. A wine the model is unsure about gets a wider band and says so, rather than pretending.
Layer two: what you know about storage
Here is the thing the textbooks ignore. The same wine ages completely differently in a steady cellar at twelve degrees than it does in a kitchen cupboard that swings with the seasons. A perfect estimate for ideal storage is the wrong estimate for your bottle if your bottle has been baking on a shelf since August.
The baseline assumes good, stable storage. A record of warm or fluctuating conditions is a reason to be cautious about that baseline. Unknown history remains unknown: entering a storage description cannot reconstruct the journey before you bought the bottle or measure its condition now.
In the cellar, each bottle has a storage setting (standard, verified ideal, cold, warm, fluctuating, unknown history or compromised), and any setting other than standard or verified ideal shifts its window. Read the adjusted window as an estimate using recorded context, alongside its confidence. The free checker on this site does not adjust for storage. A changed date cannot undo heat damage, guarantee that a bottle is sound or establish how long it will survive.
Layer three: your palate, not mine
Tasting history is another kind of evidence, with its own limits.
People do not all like wine at the same point. Some of us love the bright, primary, slightly tense version of a young red. Others want it soft, resolved, and tertiary. The “correct” peak in a textbook is an average, and you are not an average. (Never mapped your own preferences? The free wine quiz is a two minute start.)
Keep dated notes about bottles you enjoy and those you do not. Enough relevant history can reveal a preference for a grape earlier or later in its development; one rating cannot establish the ideal window for every wine. A broad preference for red wine is not evidence that every red should move by the same amount.
Once you have rated at least 3 vintage wines of the same grape as Solid Choice or Would Buy Again, windows for that grape can shift by up to 2 years. Treat that as a bounded inference from your history. It is still an estimate, and without those ratings there is no personal adjustment. Your glass remains the test of the bottle in front of you. The methodology and limitations explain how to read those dates together.
Bringing it together: Open Tonight
The cellar’s Open Tonight view focuses on timing. Sommo narrows your collection to the bottles that are ready or nearly there, and picks the one to open tonight plus one or two runners-up, favouring the wine you should not let slip past its peak. There is a separate flow for “I am cooking this, what pairs”, but Open Tonight is purely about timing. It even respects notes like “do not open, gift for Dad”, because the app should never tell you to drink the one bottle you are saving.
Why I keep rebuilding it
I improve this part of the app constantly, and I test the model’s windows against a fixed set of cases every time I touch the prompt, so it does not quietly get worse. I do this because Sommo is, honestly, the app I wished existed before I started building it. I wanted one place that scans a label, files the bottle, learns my palate, and tells me when to drink, without renting my attention to advertisers or charging a fortune.
It costs less than a single wasted bottle: $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year in the US (prices vary by country and store), with a 3-day free trial on both plans for eligible new subscribers. You add a payment method, nothing is charged until the trial ends, and it renews automatically unless you cancel. If you have ever stood in front of your rack guessing, that is the whole pitch.
Keep reading
- What is a wine drinking window? the plain-language version of the idea above
- When is Barolo ready to drink? one of the trickiest windows in wine
- How long does Burgundy age? reds, whites, and the awkward truth about both
- How to build your first real wine cellar and the best wine cellar apps in 2026
Want the cellar that actually tells you when to drink? Download Sommo and add your first bottle today.
