Wine is an addiction. No, I’m not talking about alcohol depen­dency. I’m talking about the wine collecting bug, which is very contagious indeed.

You cannot be around the wine world long before you start a collection. It is all insidious. It starts with one of those folding accordion racks that hold six to eight bottles. You quickly outgrow that rack and begin dreaming about a temperature-controlled unit.

Before long, you buy a Vinotheque wine storage cabinet with a 264-bottle capacity. You pat yourself on the back, thinking you are set for the long haul. Within a year or two you are berating yourself for not buying the 526-bottle model.

You start parking one of the cars on the driveway to make room for the new cellar that you were “forced” to purchase. You can’t have your precious wine sitting in a closet now, can you? After all, a little rain and snow won’t hurt the car.

You’re all set now, right? Wrong. The more you read and learn about wine, the more you explore new regions and the more wine you tend to stockpile. The collection is bursting at the seams.

No problem. The kid is off to college, and you’re not using that spare bedroom anymore. Why not call Apex Cellars to come out and convert the room into a wine cellar? You can have a 2,400-bottle capacity temperature-controlled room for your prized wine. Congratulations! You have just been nominated to the Wine Geek Hall of Fame.

But wait, you have an added problem. You could keep track of your collection when you only had 200 bottles. Now you have considerably more wine. The ideal drinking window for the various wines becomes blurred. Wines get forgotten about. Some wines pass their peak.

What do you do – decrease the size of the cellar? Not a chance. You have been bitten by the bug and have a severe case of enophilopathy. Your only hope is to get an injection of cellar management software.

There are several of these software programs available on the market, but CellarTracker stands head and shoulders above the rest in my opinion. The software is powerful and versatile, and the CellarTracker community has grown exponentially.

CellarTracker is the brainchild of Eric LeVine, a Seattle-area resident and former Microsoft employee. I asked LeVine what inspired the program.

“CellarTracker was just for me, a little hobby and a chance to keep track of my wine in a way that was more precise than I could in a spreadsheet,” said LeVine. “The initial implementation, which was very basic, only took about a week.

“A couple of friends wanted to use it, so it took another week to flesh things out and make them multi-user. Once I decided to really open the system up, it took a year of working part-time at night to really launch the system. Since August of 2004, I have been working on this full time in typical Microsoft fashion, probably 60 to 70 hours a week.”

You can try out CellarTracker for free. LeVine leaves payment up to the user. “I tossed the shareware concept out there as a simple way to get some compensation for my time,” said LeVine. “I’ve found that people really appreciate that they can try the system out without having to pay, so even as the site became my day job, I wanted to keep the voluntary payment approach. I find that about two-thirds of people pay for their use of the site.”

I should mention I have no connection to CellarTracker – I’m just a satisfied user. You can evaluate it yourself at www.cellartracker.com/intro.asp. Enjoy your wine collecting.

This week’s wines:

2005 Clos Du Val, Chardonnay, Carneros, Calif., $22, 13,000 cases: Sporting nice balance, this wine is crisp and creamy, with aromas and flavors of pears, citrus, toasty oak and roasted cashews. Good value; 87/88.

2006 Charles Krug, Sauvignon Blanc, Napa Valley, Calif., $18, 18,000 cases: This wine will change your mind-set about Charles Krug. It is nice to see a venerable old house get back on track. Lovely grapefruit and melon aromas lead to a very refreshing mouth feel, with loads of tropical fruit, green apples and grapefruit; 90/90.

Dr. Randy Buckner lives in Steilacoom and is a family practitioner in Olympia. Wines are rated on a 100-point scale, with the first number indicating quality and the second relative value. Write to him at randy@randybuckner.com or visit his Web site, www.wineloverspage.com/bucko.