Why I Stopped Using Vivino and Started Tracking Wine in a Spreadsheet

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I used Vivino for about three years. Scanned labels, gave star ratings, occasionally read reviews. It's a perfectly fine app for what it does – quick identification and community scores.

But I kept wanting things it couldn't do. And eventually I realized the app was solving a different problem than the one I actually had.

What I wanted vs. what Vivino gave me

My main question was simple: how much am I spending on drinks, and what do I actually like?

Vivino can tell you what you rated highly. It cannot tell you how much you spent this year, what your average price per bottle is, or whether you spend more at restaurants or wine shops. There's no spending breakdown by month, no way to track a budget, no analytics beyond "here are your top-rated wines."

A few other things that bugged me:

• It's wine-only (mostly). I also drink craft beer, whiskey and the occasional cocktail worth remembering. Vivino doesn't care about those. I'd need a separate app for beer (Untappd), another for spirits, and then my data is split across three places.
• The social feed. Half the screen is other people's reviews and sponsored wines. I don't follow anyone on Vivino. I don't want recommendations from an algorithm. I just want my own log.
• Limited filtering. I wanted to filter by country, by style (natural, orange, sparkling), by source (shop name, restaurant, gift). Vivino's filters are basic – region, grape, vintage. Not the dimensions I care about.
• Data export is weak. You can request a data export from Vivino, but the CSV you get is missing most of the useful fields. No prices, no sources, no custom notes beyond their structured format.

What a spreadsheet gives me

I switched to TasteFlux, a Google Sheets template built for drink tracking. Each entry in the Library has: name, type (wine, beer, spirit, cocktail), style, source, country, price, rating (1-10) and tasting notes.

No scanning, no social, no algorithm. I type the name, pick a few dropdowns, enter a price and move on. One row per drink.

The spending analytics

This is the part Vivino can't touch.

The Dashboard shows me:

• Total spent this year and whether I'm on pace for my annual budget
• Average price per drink – across all types and filtered by type
• Monthly spending trend – a bar chart showing which months I spent the most
• Drinks logged this year with a pace indicator toward my yearly goal

There's a budget goal in the Settings sheet. I set mine to $1,200 for the year (roughly $100/month). The Dashboard shows me my current pace – whether I'm ahead or behind – and it updates every time I add an entry.

Last year I discovered I was spending way more in November and December (holiday dinners, gifts, end-of-year celebrations). Having the data in front of me made that pattern obvious. Vivino never would have shown me that because it doesn't track price.

The Insights charts

The Insights page has charts covering the dimensions I actually care about:

• By style – what percentage is red vs. white vs. natural vs. sparkling vs. beer vs. spirit
• By country – am I drinking mostly French wine, or have I been branching out?
• By source – how much from wine shops vs. restaurants vs. online orders vs. gifts
• Rating distribution – am I being too generous with my ratings? (Yes. The histogram made that obvious.)
• Monthly activity – which months I tried the most new things

None of this requires any formula work on my end. The charts are pre-built and update automatically from the Library data.

Tracking more than wine

One thing I really like about this setup: it handles all drink types in one place. Wine, beer, spirits, cocktails. The "Type" column lets me filter the charts by category when I want to, or see everything together when I don't.

On Vivino, I had no way to log the nice bourbon I got as a birthday gift, or the craft sour beer from a local brewery, or a really good Negroni at a bar. Those just disappeared into memory. Now they're all in the same Library, with the same fields, and the same analytics.

Privacy

My tasting notes are personal. Some of them are half a sentence ("harsh tannins, won't rebuy"). Some of them are detailed enough to be embarrassing. I don't want them on a social feed, and I don't want them training anyone's recommendation model.

In a Google Sheet, my data lives in my Google Drive, with my default sharing settings (private). No followers, no profiles. Just a file on my Drive.

Vivino is a wine discovery app with a rating feature. A spreadsheet is a personal tracking tool with real analytics. I needed the second thing.

I still use Vivino occasionally – mostly to check community scores when I'm standing in front of a wine shelf and can't decide. But for my actual drink log, the spreadsheet wins on everything I care about: spending data, multi-type tracking, real charts and privacy.