[dba-Tech] Bar-code scanner

My friend Douglas is looking for a hand-held bar-code scanner. It's a
non-commercial application. He is a serious wine collector with a cellar
containing about 4K bottles (seriously, and that estimate may be on the
light side). He wants to scan all the available bar-codes and then hook up
said scanner to the db I built for him, and ultimately we'd like to hook to
some wine-database on the Net so we can grab all the info via the bar-code.
I have a program called "ANT Movie Catalog" that does this for movies: type
in the title and it reaches out to the Net and grabs the info for the
selected movie (producer, director, author, year-released, etc.).
Incidentally, this program is free and it is a wonderful creation. I would
like to do the same for wine-collectors. I am not one of these; my problem
is that whenever I purchase a bottle I immediately consume it. My friend
overcomes this by buying cases not individual bottles. Anyway, he has
several thousand bottles and has been duly recording them in a series of XL
worksheets. I have imported all his recorded data into an Access db, but a
bunch of useful info is lacking.

I want to do this:
a) scan the bar-codes
b) reach out to the Net and obtain the useful data (Country, Region,
Vintage, etc.)
c) upsert the data into the Access table.

This is a non-profit operation, so any free avenues are invaluable, so to
speak. Any suggestions are most welcome. Beginning with the hardware: a
hand-held bar-code scanner that can read the labels on his wine-bottles;
reaching out to the Net for further info is Step Two.

Can anyone recommend a hand-held bar-code scanner that hooks up to a
desktop once he returns from the wine-cellar, having scanned numerous
bottles?

Incidentally, I cannot praise ANT Movie Catalog enough. It is a superb
program, and should you happen to be a compulsive collector (as I am) of
DVD movies, this is a program that you need; and it's free!

I want to do what he has done, but for wines rather than movies. Any ideas,
suggestions, etc. are most welcome.

-- 
Arthur
Cell: 647.710.1314

Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it's the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
   -- from the Daodejing