Wine Apps You Need to Check Out in 2024
I’m always asked by people what wine apps are the best to use.
I have downloaded SO MANY wine apps in my time. Some I use daily/weekly/monthly and others I download, use one, and then they sit there until I’m bored enough to go through and delete them.
Therefore to answer the question… it depends! It really depends what kind of app you are after. Some of the different types of wine apps you can get are:
What are the different types of wine apps?
- Wine reviews (e.g. Vivino, Vinus, Delectable, Tipple)
- Searching for wine prices and retailers (e.g. Wine-Searcher, Vinloco)
- Buying wine (e.g. Good Pair Days, Awesomme, Naked Wines, Vivino, Vinus, etc)
- Help choosing a wine based on taste/occasion/food etc (e.g. Hello Vino)
- Managing your wine collection/cellar (e.g. OENO by Vintec, CellarTracker)
- Multi-use (e.g. My Wine World)
- A bit of fun (e.g. When Wine)
I pretty much use wine apps for recording my tasting notes and to record what’s in my cellar.
It’s interesting to keep a log of what you taste to see what you drink a lot of and what you don’t. Plus, don’t you hate it when you have the most amazing wine but cannot remember anything other than ‘there was a bird on the label and it started with M’?
I also want to point out that I don’t use all the features available in each of the below apps, just what I need so bear in mind there’s probably more awesomeness to the app than I mention here.
Theses are the 4 free wine apps I use regularly:
In fact I probably open them daily. Yep I know… I am a bit of a wino. Enjoy!
OENO by Vintec
Okay so I was very spoilt for my birthday last year and I got not one but two Vintec wine fridges. I have always wanted some proper cellar storage and it only took me 34 years to get it 😉 When I was registering my fridges I learnt about the ONEO by Vintec app. It’s a wine cellar management app however it also has a ton of features I absolutely love.
I would highly recommend this app for all serious wine lovers!
Pros:
- You don’t have to have a Vintec product to use this app, you can use it for any type of wine cellar – I even use it for my ‘under the stairs’ storage
- The wine scanner is through Vivino, so it picks up most wines
- You can easily move wines to different places in your cellar
- If you take a bottle out and drink it, you just need to hit the consume button to remove it from your cellar (plus you can also see the list of wines you have consumed)
- You can also add your own ratings and notes for each wine entry
- They give you advice on what type of glassware to use for each of your wines alongside the aging potential and the recommended aeration time and serving temperature
- I LOVE the search function, especially when it comes to one of the international wine days of the year, as I can just search for the. grape variety or wine style.
Cons:
- I have had a few issues manually putting in wines, however after getting in touch with the Vintec team I learnt that you have to fill in all the info fields for each wine – which is a bit time consuming, especially if you are logging many bottles
Vivino Wine Scanner
This was one of the very first wine apps I downloaded – I have a few qualms with it but I still can’t let it go as there are a lot of positives to it. Plus with its updates the app gets better and better. Check out my Vivino profile (and let’s connect!).
Pros:
- View ratings, reviews and prices based on uploading/taking a photo of a wine or wine list
- You can like and comment on your friends wines
- You can easily find how many wines you’ve rated
- You receive badges for trying different types of wines from different places and the amount of wines you’ve tried
- Your taste profile (see what you drink regularly broken down by grape varietal + region)
- You receive a rank in your country for your interaction with the app (i.e. how big of a wino you are – looks like I’m doing pretty well at 35 in AU!)
- You can go back and edit your review and any details at a later date if you need to
Cons:
- If the app cannot recognise your wine off your picture then you have to enter all the details in manually, which can be a bit of a ball buster if you just want to write your tasting note
- I’m still not a fan of giving ratings, I wish you could have a choice to rate it or not. I find a comment is sufficient bearing in mind how subjective wine tasting can be. At least it’s just a star system but still.. (check out my post here on why I don’t like to rate or score wines)
Delectable Wines – Wine Scanner, Ratings & Reviews
I originally downloaded the Delectable wine app as I noticed many winos in Perth were using it. So it’s great to keep in touch with what everyone around me is drinking. I have now logged over 1,700 wines and I am a premium member. See my Delectable profile here (and let’s connect!)
Pros:
- View ratings, reviews and prices based on uploading/taking a photo of a wine
- You can like and comment on your friends wines alongside tagging friends and locations
- You can easily find how many wines you’ve rated
- If the app can’t/wrongly identifies your wine you can submit it for a manual review which I’ve found typically takes less than an hour and in the meantime you can still put in your tasting note in the moment
- If you don’t touch the rating bar when putting in your review it won’t give an out of 10 rating, for me this works!
- Taste Insights
- You can go back and edit your review and any details at a later date if you need to
Okay so it’s not technically a wine app, but by goodness there are a lot of tasty wine instagram accounts to follow!
Some of my favourites wine Instagrammers to follow right now are:
- @goodpairdays
- @the_wine_wench
- @thenonsommelier_sommelier
- @aussie.wine.diaries
- @unravelingwine
- @_walk_the_wine_
- @nuttyaboutwinesmee
- @downtoawineart
- @vino_fiend
- @kara_irving
- @winetakesmymoney
There are so many more, so just head over to my Instagram page and check out who I am following!
Grab this app on Android or iOS
More popular wine apps to consider
There are a number of other wine apps I’d like to mention as despite not using them as regularly as the above, I do jump in them every now and then to have a look:
Good Pair Days
Do you have a Good Pair Days wine subscription? Then this app is a must! You can track your orders, place your orders and keep a close eye on your points and badges.
Grab this app on Android or iOS
When Wine Tastes Best
You know how you can buy biodynamic wine? Well there is also a biodynamic calendar for wine drinkers app called ‘When Wine Tastes Good’. The app can tell you in a matter of seconds what kind of day it is.
Grab this app on Android or iOS
Coravin
I was kindly gifted a Coravin wine system last year which is how I came across the Coravin wine app. It’s an app to capture all your beloved wine moments and what is quite unique is it helps you pair wine with movies, TV Shows, music and more! Plus if you’re lucky enough to have the Coravin Model Eleven it connects to it with Bluetooth for even more of a juicy wine app experience!!
Grab this app on Android or iOS
Awesomme
Awesomme is an Australian wine-finder app aka your personal sommelier. It’s a nicely designed and user-friendly app that helps you find wines. It has a unique Value For Money scale to make buying great wine for your budget easier.
Grab this app on Android or iOS
WSET
Sitting my WSET 2 and 3 certifications were a big part of my wine-life. And how I taste wine is all to do with their training. Therefore this app was a no brainer for me. You can add normal and blind tasting notes based on their wine tasting systematic approach.
Grab this app on Android or iOS
PS: I also just recently found out there’s a WSET Wine Game app too!
Hello Vino app
I love this American app for the food and wine matching section. For instance you can work out what wine will go best with your meal, the recommended wine for a certain occasion and more! It’s so detailed and full of so many suggestions of pairings for everything from seafood paella to pepperoni pizza and even devilled eggs!
Grab this app on Android or iOS
Vinloco app
Relatively new on the scene, this Aussie app will help you not get ripped off when buying wine. Simply scan the barcode or search by the wines name and it’ll tell you if paying $30 for that bottle is good value or not
Wine-Searcher app
Most of you will probably be familiar with wine-searcher.com – this is their app. It will help you pull a ton of info on a particular wine such as expert ratings, grape varieties, and from where and for how much you can buy a wine. GPS data will even find the closest bottlo (aka bottle shop) to you with it.
You can find, compare and buy wine through the app alongside having the ability to scan a label and find info on over 8 million wines from 55,000 merchants around the globe. You can add pictures and/or ratings for wines you have consumed to help remind you down the track what you like and dislike – plus you can see what others using the app think of certain wines too.
CellarTracker app
A few years ago I was using the desktop version to manage my wine cellar in NZ. It’s a pretty straight forward app to keep track of your wine collection.
Naked Wines
If you’re part of the Naked Wines club in Australia then I’d suggest you jump onboard with their app. You can order through the app and also rate the wines as you drink them.
Of course there are tons more awesome wine apps out there, all with their own unique qualities. If you have favourite wine apps, make sure to leave a comment below about why they are so darn good so the rest of us are in the know too 🙂
Thanks for introducing your app Ken!
Hi Casey,
Excellent review! I like how you’ve identified the various categories of wine apps.
I’d like to recommend checking out Cellar Star as solution for managing a wine collection/cellar.
Cellar Star is and iOS app that is free to use with use with small collections but can accommodate collections of any size.
To get started, you can either import your current wine cellar or easily create/configure cellars and bins in Cellar Star to match your storage layout and then add your wines.
Cellar Star is designed to help you effectively use your wine collection:
* Make informed selections from your cellar. Focus your attention on wines that are ready to open.
* Select wines ready for opening using built in sorting and filtering options designed to focus on how you like to make your choices: by name, star rating, year, place and origin, and more.
* Predictive text, that knows your collection and the wine regions of the world, makes adding new wine easy.
* Full iCloud support keeps your inventory synchronizes across your devices, and enables backup and restore to your iCloud Drive.
Read more here:
https://thinkmobile.biz
Apple App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/cellar-star/id648035297?mt=8
Cheers!
Thanks for the heads up!
Another one http://distantsomm.com/get
Oh how strange, I am wondering if it is a technical glitch? Have you tried logging into your account via desktop to see if your account and history is still there? https://delectable.com/
Delectable appears to have been pulled from Google play. Have lost all my history
Glad you found it helpful Joy 🙂
Thanks, it really helpful to me. I usually use both Android and IOS
I haven’t come across Combivino yet, I’ll have to check it out! Thanks for the heads up 😉
Excellent analysis, but you forgot Combivino! 😉
Hi Casey,
Great review – there are certainly some great Apps out there.
May we kindly recommend a brand new app called Swirl?
Firstly, Swirl is completely free to install and free to use. Endorsed by Sommeliers, Swirl is designed for budding wine experts, especially those that organize wine tastings. Create a group for open label or blind wine tasting and then invite friends to Swirl. Have fun, tasting, rating and capturing special moments. You can switch from standard to Expert mode and Swirl guides you through a tasting scheme similar to WSET. Rapid for beginners or comprehensive for experts, Swirl provides a wonderful way to capture your tasting notes.
For ‘blind tasting’ events Swirl is just brilliant for helping keep track of everyone’s input. And when you’re ready for the big reveal, Swirl will instantly reveal the results to everyone. What wine have you tasted, which was the most popular, who got the most correct guesses (leaderboard), who brought the winning wine and of course lots of info about the wines. Swirl has a label scanner that generates links to online reviews & where to buy.
With Swirl you can create private or public wine groups and quickly build a social network. Swirl notifies your network when you review a wine so look out for likes and notifications! Check out your network and see what wines other people love or search the data base for wines with a specific flavor – like black cherry or vanilla!
Read more here:
https://www.facebook.com/Swirl-105567458297632/
Install Swirl on any device at
https://swirlwine.de/
Thanks for a terrific blog Casey! We would love to hear your feedback too 🙂
Thanks so much Allison, I am so glad you found it useful 🙂
Haha tell me about it Robin, it can be a bit of a chore keeping things up to date! OENO though is a really handy cellar app, it’s definitely my go-to! Thanks for stopping by the blog 🙂
What a great breakdown on so many Wine Apps. I use the WSET for tasting notes and I did have one for the cellar, but oh, my goodness…where to find the time to keep that updated! LOL. I will keep this as a reference, so I can perhaps thin or add to my list of wine apps.
We often get asked for recommendations on Apps and this is a really great summary — will certainly help anyone trying to wade through them all and figure out which is best. We’ll be sure to send those requests this link!
I would add one more iOS wine app on your list: gotBottle.
It helps you to track your wines, explore aromas and flavors and learn about wine!
I didn’t realise they aggregate taste comments Tony, that’s good to know. It’s also good to see they are continually improving the app, which I love 🙂 Thanks for your insights!
Vivino does offer to manually ID labels that it can’t automagically match up. I had that happen a couple of times – half and hour or so and the label is matched to an entry.
I tend to disagree about the ratings thing – it does provide an aggregate index of perceived quality and that is useful when standing in the bottle shop. The downside to reviews is that people have wildly divergent tasting abilities … both in what they taste and in how able they are to describe it. I’ve lost count of the Vivino entries where the same wine is described as “mild” and “powerful” or “dry” and, well, not-dry. Also the *really* helpful and descriptive reviewer … “fruity I liked it” … nonsense. Grrrrr….
A low signal-to-noise ratio is the bane of all review-driven apps. Vivino is adding to their UI so they aggregate taste comments like eg “75% of reviews mentioned oak” which is an interesting move to try and extract data from the noise.
Vivino is my go to wine app. I mainly use it to keep track of all the different wines I try and I like that you can make little notes, whether they be tasting notes or even just where you tried it and what you paired it with.
Great synopsis! Like you, I mostly use wine apps for reviewing and seeing what others are talking about. Vivino is by far my favorite on that front!
-Greig
NICE! Great to see this organized into one list. I used Delectable religiously, and I can’t live without CellarTracker. Great to learn about a few newbies, too!
So helpful! I always wonder what to use when I go to the store and wish I had recommendations.
Thanks for the summaries. I am going to have to try a couple of these out. I love cellartracker. However, I tend to have trouble remembering to note that I drank the bottle. 🙂
Ah, you hit my sweet spot, mobile apps and wine! I spend my day job consulting and building services for mobile apps…and by night I drink wine 🙂 I’ve tried many of the apps out but they are still missing the wow factor for me. They all have nuances of cool stuff but I long for more. I want something that shakes things up like Uber!
I have the Delectable App. They were just purchased by Antonio Galloni’s Vinous (not to be confused with the Vinus app), so we will see if it changes at all. I like it for keeping track of wines and I do love the manual review feature, which is very helpful and quicker than you would imagine.
I feel like I tried Hello Vino at some point, but it’s not on my phone now. I may give it another shot for a quick food pairing app.
And I, like you, really wish I could avoid the rating.
Thanks for all the insights!
Perfect timing with this post as we were just talking about which/whether to use more apps related to wine. Thanks for doing our work for us 😉 — very helpful!
New apps to try! I’m a sucker for Vivino but def am going to give a few of these a try! Makes me wish I had an iphone even though I’m an Android junkie 🙂
Thanks for the heads up Steve!!
Here’s the best app Casey!
Wineosphere…only available on IOS, but the best feature is when you are in a wine shop, you can scan the bottles bar code and up pops a review of the wine from the likes of Gary Walsh Campbell Mattinson and Mike Bennie. There is thousands of reviews and also a community where you can post your own thoughts on the wine you are drinking and comment on others
oh and if ever you get the chance, grab the Book, The Wine Hunter by Campbell Mattinson….you won’t put it down.
Cheers
Steve
No worries Elisha – have fun trying them out!
More Apps!! Thanks for the heads up.