After lots of practice, I’ve reached the stage where I can usually tell a good wine from a bad one. But there’s an awful lot of bluffing involved. If I’m asked for an assessment, I mutter something about ‘tannins’ and ‘structure’, while eyeing the bottle for the alcohol content and price. A good-looking label helps too: simple but classy, with a hint of grandi-loquence lurking at the periphery.
It’s people like me who are likely to benefit most from the spate of wine scanner apps hitting the market, challenging the expertise of wine buff show-offs. These apps analyse bottle labels and provide information about the wine, region, grapes, price and food pairings. For those keen to learn more about the industry, or fake a level of expertise they can never genuinely hope to possess, it’s a great idea — if, at the moment, rather a flawed one.
The apps I tested were Vivino, Delectable, Wine Searcher, Corkbin, Snooth Pro, Hello Vino and Drync. Of these, the clear frontrunners are Vivino, Delectable and Wine Searcher. Of the others, Corkbin looked good, but was notably unconcerned about identifying any of the six wines I tested, while Snooth Pro froze immediately after accepting £2.99 of my generously proffered cash. Hello Vino also made me cough up — $0.99 for each set of five scans — but could not identify two of the wines, did not differentiate them by vintage and provided sparse details about each. Drync, a free app, was similarly apathetic about vintages and also failed to recognise two at the first try (though it later did).
Of the three pacemakers, Vivino seemed the most impressive. This app is the veteran of the marketplace, having been around for five years, and has more than half a million wines in its database.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in