I conceived of this on <2023-07-19 Wed>, shortly before the UK’s alcohol duty changes came into effect: I had noticed that organisations seemed to be paywalling this information and wondered if the wine trade might have any interest in a crowd-sourced repository.
Though I had the fundamentals in place probably within 2–3 weeks, as memory serves, other things in life had to take priority and I put this project on hold until the middle of 2024-03; ultimately, I only had what I considered a MVP by around <2024-04-13 Sat>.
Arguably, this whole thing could have been created in an hour in Google Sheets: a Form, a worksheet with a raw data table, and individual worksheets holding QUERY formulas. I guess I just needed an excuse to dabble; to create something Quite Technical for what in my opinion is one of the most oddly old-school industries around.
Above all, this is just a fun little project for me. As of <2024-04-21 Sun> it’s not entirely clear how much time I’ll be able to spend on this past the MVP point. You may well argue that I have no idea what I’m doing, that the code is spaghetti, etc. and these would all be fair comments. Feel free to make suggestions — or take advantage of the GPL-3.0 license.
Shortly past midnight on <2024-04-28 Sun>, abvdb.hugopoon.com, the original ABVDB (and probably only one ever, unless someone actually thinks this code is worth their drive space) went live.
git clone
cd abvdb
less deploy.sh # Blind trust could be a bad idea here.
chmod +x deploy.sh
./deploy.sh