BY OWEN MORRIS
Apple opened up their application store Friday on iTunes, letting owners of iPhones and iPod Touches download applications to their devices. Being an owner of the latter, this was a release I was extremely eager for.
A wine application seems like the perfect fit for the iPhone, which is able to hold a lot of information and disseminate it quickly within a very small package. I’m not going to drag a big wine book to the store but I will whip out my iPod touch. That’s why it’s sad to report that there is currently only one wine application available for the iPhone. Come on developers, you can come up with a dozen tip calculators but only one wine picking app?
This one application is called the Wine Snob and is developed by 9MMedia. For $2.99 they say you’ll get the information to “navigate the wine shops like a pro and seek the wine list with confidence.” Well, I plucked down my $2.99 and planned on using the Wine Snob to help me pick out the perfect gift wine for a party I had this weekend with relatives. I quickly learned that Wine Snob wasn't going to be much help. The information Wine Snob gives is so generic and so elementary, it’s laughable. For instance, here in its entirety is Wine Snob’s entry for Rose wines.
“Roses, also called blush wines, are light pink wines made from several red wine grapes. They get their color from a very short period of contact with the grape skins during the wine-making process. Roses are light and usually have some sweetness.”
That’s it. That’s the whole entry. The reason I’m not worried about copyright stealing for quoting an entire entry is that the Wine Snob admits to lifting their own entries from Wikipedia. In other words, I just paid three bucks to read shortened Wikipedia articles!
It’s the same with their information about different grapes and the wine quotes that come with the application might as well be lifted from the first Google result for “wine+quotes.” There’s absolutely no information about the differences in years, countries or regions nor is one actual bottle of wine listed.
It’s a dummy's guide to wine under the misleading name Wine Snob. If it were free, I wouldn’t care or be blogging about it, leaving you to find it for yourself. But to charge for this application is wrong. I wished I had saved my $2.99 for a bottle of Boone’s Farm.
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Hello there Wasup
I saw yer thread
Very well constructed
In fact I have been searching for this for months
blogs.pitch.com will see me back again
Great effort congrats !
John
[url=http://www.comparemobile.org/?... [/url]
Wine Jot is a neat application as well, recently the price was cut down by 60%! From $4.99 to $1.99. It a perfect wine log application.
http://www.purplehazeapps.com/...
and iTunes link.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObj...
Another really nice wine app is Velvet Vine. They sync all of your wine data to the cloud and have a very nice cellar, journal and search. Check them out at:
http://www.velvetvine.com
Finally, there is quality guide available for your iPhone:
http://www.mobileage.com/wineg...
absolutely correct! there is still no wine guide application, not even a web application. my local wine store even puts out a wine selection/buying guide booklet.
There is a new app on the app store that allows you to take pictures of wines that you liked so that you remember them. You can rate them and save all the information about the wine that you like or even disliked. I downloaded it and I really like it. Now I will always be able to know which wines I liked when I am at the grocery store and trying to pick out a bottle.
Here is a link to the app:
http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edg...
I also bought Wine Snob and I am happy with what I got. I like the breif descriptions and the pairing info - I never know how to pair wine with foods, so it's great for me. Also, the app just got updated last night and there are a lot of cool new features - you can log all the wines you drink and tag them for searching, take pictures of the bottles etc. They expanded the wine descriptions and pairings, and the update info says that the people who made it consulted with experts to get better information. Best of all, there are cheese pairings now!
I also bought wine snob and really like it. It never pretended to be a guide to the best years of wine or describe different bottles...look at the image you posted of it's main navigation and infer from there. The terminology is great and what they have on varietals and types is informative and short and sweet which is perfect because I don't want to read a whole frigin book. I could go for a few more varietals though. The only thing I found on there that kind of sucked was the quotes...i mean, there's a lot better quotes about wine out there than that. Hopefully that was just the start of it and they are adding more with updates.
I tried Wine Snob and actually like it. The author is correct, its basically a dictionary so it will not help you find a good wine shop or anything. But,I found it to be a nice refresher on wine terminology though.
There are now two more wine apps on the app store Wine Pad and Wine Log. Both are essentially wine journals on the iPhone:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObj...
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