What Vivino costs, and what Barello gives away

Vivino's Cellar upgrades screen puts it plainly. Premium buys "access via your desktop and enhanced stats like collection value and drinking windows."

So the year a bottle is worth opening sits behind the subscription. For most people that's the question they opened a cellar app to answer.

Barello puts it on the front of every bottle for nothing. The dates come from the grape and the style, so a Chianti Classico isn't read as a generic Sangiovese.

And when it can't place a wine, it says so and shows no window, rather than making a date up.

This is the part we haven't seen anywhere else.

A shelf in a Melbourne lounge room runs a wine's clock faster than a wine fridge does. So the dates move. A bottle you'd have held another two years turns up in tonight's list while it's still good.

Same rules, run against your house instead of a reference cellar. You tell it where you live and where the wine goes, once, when you set up.

Point it at any label in a bottle shop and it tells you what the crowd thinks and roughly what you should pay, for nothing. That's a very good thing to have in your pocket, and it isn't the job Barello does. Barello starts once the bottle is home: where it's kept, when it's ready, and whether tonight is the night.

Vivino is a big, venture-backed business. Its last funding round, announced in February 2021, was US$155 million, led by the Swedish investment firm Kinnevik, which put in US$70 million of it. Creandum, GP Bullhound and Sprints Capital invested alongside. Vivino said at the time that the round took its total raised to US$221 million. An earlier round, in 2018, was led by SCP Neptune International, with Balderton and Creandum among the existing backers.

There's nothing wrong with raising money. But investors who've put in that much expect a return, and the cellar is one of the places a wine app can charge.

I used Vivino for years, and I gave it a lot: every bottle I scanned, rated and put in its cellar. What came back, more and more, was an app selling me things. The features kept changing under me, and the useful part, knowing when a bottle is ready, sat behind the subscription. That's a big part of why Barello exists.

The bottle limit of 2026 is the same pattern. It landed on free users, enough of them said so that Vivino took it back in October, and credit to them for saying "you were right" in public. But it tells you where the decisions come from now. To me it reads like a company working out what it can sell, rather than what it can give back for all the data people have handed it. Pat, who built Barello

Barello doesn't total up what your cellar is worth. That's a choice about what the price is for: Tuesday wine or birthday wine. Bottles fall into bands you set yourself, and nothing adds them together.

If knowing what a cellar is worth is why you track it, Vivino Premium does that and this doesn't.

Vivino also has a review community and a shop. Barello has neither and isn't trying to. It's a cellar and a bar for one household, not a place to find or buy wine.

Wine, spirits and cocktails sit in one household inventory. The gin is in the same place as the Barossa Shiraz, so the app can tell you that tonight you could open the Shiraz or make a Negroni.

And it's the household's inventory, not one person's. Everyone in the house sees the same shelf, so whoever opens the bottle, everyone knows it's gone.

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Everything on this page was read on an Australian account, in Australian dollars. Barello is built in Melbourne by a two-person studio, and the cellar side was built around the way wine is kept here: a cupboard through a Melbourne summer runs a bottle's clock faster than a wine fridge does, so the window moves with it.