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31 Comments

  1. 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!

  2. 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 🙂

  3. 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 🙂

  4. 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.

  5. 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!

  6. 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!

  7. 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!

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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

  11. 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!

  12. 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. 🙂

  13. 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!

  14. 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!

  15. 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!

  16. 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 🙂

  17. 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