Best Wine Apps to Help You Pick a Perfect Bottle – CNET
Best Wine Apps to Help You Pick a Perfect Bottle - CNET
Why we like it: The most crowdsourced reviews and ratings along with tons of information in a user-friendly app. Plus, it lets you order wine for delivery.
I will never walk into a wine store without this app, and you shouldn’t either. There are a number of apps that let you scan a wine label to get information about the wine, but we found the Vivino app provides the most useful information. It also has more users than any other app (the website says more than 61 million), so you’re getting extremely valuable crowdsourced ratings and reviews, even on some pretty obscure bottles.
After you take a photo of a label, it gives you an average rating and price so you know if you are holding a good wine at a good price. You can also scan the text of a wine list should you find yourself clueless in a restaurant. In addition to rating and price, Vivino provides notes about the type of grape used in the wine, info about the winery that made the wine and a variety of additional rankings for that wine within its winery, region, country and world.
You can read reviews from other Vivino users and add your own, but what I find fun and interesting are the winemaker’s notes (as in, “hints of toffee, cherry, fig, chocolate”), vintage comparison (how it stacks up to other years’ wines), and food pairing suggestions (beef, lamb, spicy food). The wines you scan are saved to a My Wines list and will eventually build a taste profile, and the app will recommend other wines that fit your profile. You can also build a feed, where you can follow friends who use the app as well as wine enthusiasts and pros. It also recognizes the labels for beer and spirits but with less success than wine labels.
And since I last looked at the app, Vivino has added the ability to buy wine through the app or web platform and have it delivered to your door. Shipping generally costs between $12 and $15 per order but is free if you spend a certain amount. The free shipping benchmark varies based on the seller but is typically around $160.