Search for wine apps in the Apple App Store or Google Play and you’ll find hundreds lined up all waiting to be downloaded. But which ones really add to your drinking experience? The answer, sadly, is very few. Many of these apps are as popular and enjoyable as a 10-year-old Beaujolais Nouveau – and gathering just as much virtual dust. But there are a handful that are well worth downloading, some of which won’t cost you a penny.
There are numerous reasons why there are so few decent wine apps on the market. For developers, making money from apps isn’t easy. They’re expensive to produce and sell for very little – if you can convince people to pay for them at all. It’s even more challenging when you’re dealing with a small niche market like wine lovers. One solution is to sell users a bottle of wine or two in-app. This will normally mean directing people to a third-party retailer and taking a cut; but margins on wine are slim already, and a thin slice of a small morsel amounts to slim pickings.
Furthermore, accurately predicting which wines an individual might enjoy is tricky. Taste isn’t rational. Just because I like Muscadet doesn’t mean I don’t like Meursault. I like Syrah, but not Shiraz. I like Malbec – but not all Malbecs. To date there’s only one thing on my device that I use to point out specific new wines I might enjoy and that’s my favourite wine merchant’s phone number.
Consequently, most wine apps that perform well don’t try and tell you exactly what to buy. They help connect you with other wine lovers, review the best places to enjoy wine, suggest food matching ideas, provide interesting and useful background information, help you learn, keep track of wines you’ve enjoyed or just let you indulge your inner wine geek. The following apps do all that and more.
