Mobile apps exist to make your life easier and better.
When it comes to wine, this can mean a few different things: learn more about wine, helping you chose better wine, record your tasting experiences, get a better deal/price for your plonk, find expert ratings, or pick the best vintage.
Also, and it’s not the least advantage, some great wine apps give you the opportunity to join a community of wine connoisseurs, experts and everyday drinkers alike, to share and exchange your thoughts about every bottle.
Much like Trip Advisor has changed the way we communicate about places we’ve visited to let everyone know how it was, wine apps are changing the game of wine appreciation. Virtually, we should never buy a bottle of bad wine ever again! That’s of course, if it wasn’t for cork taint. There’s no app for that yet!
For everything else, I’ve gathered the best and most useful wine apps available out there, on iPhone and sometimes Android, with useful links to the App Store and Google Play store for easy downloading.
Have fun, and more importantly, enjoy your wine. This does mean: let go of your phone for a minute or two, and take the time to sniff and swirl too ?
For full disclosure, I did work myself at a couple of the wine app companies mentioned below, so perhaps that’s why they are here. Or maybe I worked with them because they’re the best!
The Best Mobile Wine Applications for 2019
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Vivino:
Vivino is a wine app that scans wine labels and provides details about that wine such as user and expert ratings, price, features, and the nearest store where you can buy it or purchase and order directly on your phone. This app is a personal wine guide for newbies and connoisseurs alike.
Generally considered the best wine label-scanning application for smartphone, and certainly the one with the largest worldwide community, claiming over 34 million users to date and to be ‘the largest wine library in the world‘.
The app also includes a wealth of information about wine regions, wine & food pairings, grape varieties, and allows you to purchase wine ‘based on your taste, like-minded users and the magic of deep Vivino knowledge“.
Available for Download on iPhone and Android
Find out more on vivino.com
Related Reads: Sharing My Wine Knowledge on Vivino
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Decanter Know Your Wine:
Decanter’s Know Your Wine provides a way to learn about wine, a tool for budding sommeliers, those facing wine exams or anyone who would like to enjoy confident wine knowledge.
This is not a quiz app; it’s all about learning and remembering the myriad of information around wine. Decanter Know Your Wine is a microlearning app. It uses s p a c i n g to deliver learning in highly efficient short lessons.
Use the app little and often and progress through a series of rankings en route to becoming a Know Your Wine Grand Master. Complete the program and your knowledge of wine will become exceptional. You might even begin to master some of the app’s online quizzes! More questions will be added over time, so keep checking back.
Know Your Wine is brought to you by Decanter Magazine and powered by Feed Your Elephant. It is free to download and comes with over 10 free modules. Further modules are available as in app purchases or via annual auto-renewable subscription.
Available only for iPhone on iTunes.
Find out more on decanter.com
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Cellar Tracker:
CT is one of the very most popular wine cellar apps has a label scanning feature along with reviews and tasting notes. It lets you know what other consumers think about the wines you have selected.
CellarTracker claims to be the world’s largest collection of wine reviews, tasting notes and personal stories from people who love wine — available for iPhone and iPad! The apps allows to: 1•Read & Write Wine Reviews• Find over 2.8 million wines, read more than 7.9 million tasting notes (community and professional) for great recommendations, and join a community of over 566,000 users to share your opinions. Fully integrated with professional reviews from Antonio Galloni, Stephen Tanzer, Allen Meadows, Jancis Robinson, Decanter and more (separate subscriptions may be required). 2•Manage Your Collection• Use our online cellar management tool to track your collection, see its value, and much more. Users are currently managing 96 million bottles and counting! 3•Label Recognition• Search for a wine by taking a photo of the label, or quickly capture photos and notes of multiple wines for later reference. Access your entire history of captured labels to remember what you’ve been drinking. 4•Scan Barcodes• Easily scan UPC/EAN barcodes on wines, as well as custom CellarTracker barcodes, to make cellar management a breeze. 5•Track Consumption History• CellarTracker allows you to track what you’ve been drinking — from your cellar, a restaurant, winery or anywhere — and add your own tasting notes, ratings and label images.
Available on the App Store and Google Play
Find out more on cellartracker.com
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VinoCell – wine cellar manager:
This is not a free app unfortunately, but sometimes I guess one has to pay (the price of a cheap bottle of wine) to get a good app. Available for $8.99 at the time of writing this article.
VinoCell is a complete app to manage your wine list, graphically display your cellar, to record both your tastings and pro ratings and to match dishes to your wines. The app is perfect for beginners who can use the main fields but it also caters for experts who can play with its infinite possibilities. Top features: 1 Up to 50 different descriptors (name, country, region, appellation, varietals, maturity, color, alcohol…etc) and 3 images per wine: no compromise! 2 Text search in the 1 million internal wine database – or add your wines manually but quickly using the internal country, region, appellation and varietal database. 3 Graphical representation of your cellar’s racks and shelves with 40 different configurations to choose from.
– Full bottle life management from input to output date. 4 Easy placement of a bottle in your cellar using the double tap feature. 5 Quickly locate and highlight bottles in your cellar for easy access. 6 Powerful search engine with 40 fields. Need to find the 2007 Australian shiraz from the Barossa Valley, drunk last month with your friend Bob, priced between $15 and $20, with a point score of 91? You can! 7 Tasting notes management and a choice of scoring scales: 5 stars, 20 points, 100 points… 8 Pro rating can be added using 70 world guides or contests/challenges (Parker, WS…). 9 Complete cellar stats: countries, regions, colors, vintages, varietals, purchases, providers…etc.
Available only for iPhone on the iTunes Store
Find out more on apps.vinocell.com
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Delectable
If you have found a delicious wine and now want to know more about that wine, scan its label with Delectable app. It will reveal all the unknown facts about that wine.
Take a photo of a wine label and instantly get ratings and descriptions with Delectable, the critically-acclaimed free app that helps you get access to the world’s best wine. Keep track of your favorites and learn more about wine by following the world’s leading winemakers, sommeliers and wine critics. Buy wines you love from your phone. And all this works for beer and spirits too!
Available on the iPhone and Android
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Pocket Wine Pairing
Food and wine pairing app, clear, accessible and easy to understand.
This FREE app from Wine Paradigm gives access to the comprehensive food pairing features in Pocket Wine (a popular wine app in the USA, UK and Canada). It gives you a detailed index of hundreds of meal types, showing you the best matches for different wine styles, grape varieties and blends. A “Do’s & Don’ts” section, along with a “Quick Guide To Food Types” provides valuable and easy to follow information enabling you to discover even more unique food and wine pairings for yourself.
In addition, the app gives you access to the “My Wines” section, where you can add photos and details of wines you like, as well as adding them to your cellar.
Available on iTunes
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Localwineevents
Whenever there is a wine exhibition around you, this app will inform about the event. This app offers information on both large and small wine events. Possibly the most complete app for wine events.
The Wine Events App allows you to: 1 Easily find wine & food events taking place near you 2 Explore events in other cities while on-the-go 3 Discover exclusive wine & food getaways 4 Find upcoming events just on the weekend 5 Save money with exclusive ticket deal offers 6 Add events to your calendar 7 Easily share events via email, text message, Facebook & Twitter.
Available on the App Store and Google Play
Find out more on localwineevents.com
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Living Wine Labels
There had to be an AR app in 2019 top 10 wine apps. Global wine producer Treasury Wine Estate leads the way of AR in wine with this app that brings wine labels to life (sometimes scary ones too!) and let’s you access the story behind a wine from your smartphone.
From swirling vortexes to grim confessions, the app brings the labels to life – and reveals the story behind every bottle. Start by scanning an AR-enabled label to watch its story unfold. Share the app with your friends and update regularly to access new experiences. Now Available within the app: 1- 19 Crimes: Come face-to-face with infamous convicts as you hear their side of the story. 2- The Walking Dead Wines (exclusive to US and Canada): Join Rick Grimes of The Walking Dead on a dangerous supply run, or dodge the grasping hands of a zombie or use both bottles to unlock the ultimate battle for survival: a showdown worthy of the apocalypse. 3- Beringer Bros.: Journey back to 1895 and help the Brothers capture a moment in history. 4- Gentleman’s Collection: Let Dr. Lindeman’s wistful words bring out the discerning gentleman in you. 5- Chateau St. Jean (exclusive to US and Canada): Watch the Chateau come to life as winemaker Margo Van Staaveren narrates a magical day at the estate.
Find out more on iTunes or on Android’s Google Play
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Useful Expert Ratings Applications
There are a bunch of wine ratings apps from international experts and publications, that generally allows you to access their scores and tasting notes, given you are a subscribor.
I personally prefer to really on the reviews provided for free on the best wine blogs, including the wine reviews right here on Social Vignerons, but below are broadly aknowledged experts sharing ratings via their apps.
Vinous: Wine Reviews & ratings
Access ratings and notes by Antonio Galloni, Stephen Tanzer, Neal Martin and the rest of Vinous’s team of world-renowned critics. Find it on iTunes.
Wine Scanner & Expert Reviews by Natalie McLean
Natalie MacLean is a Canadian wine writer, as an author of books, articles and the publisher of a subscription website based in Toronto, Canada. Find it on iTunes.
Robert Parker Scores
Do I need to introduce Robert Parker! Find the app on iTunes.
WineRatings+ by Wine Spectator
And do I need to explain what is the Wine Spectator. Find the app on iTunes.
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Wine Searcher
This is the wine app you need if you’re looking at comparing wine prices or market prices for specific wines.
This app is a search engine for wine, containing price information of up to many million wine offers, and allowing to check for global availability of your favorite wine. You can use the label recognition to find the best place for buying.
Available on the App Store and Google Play
Find out more on Wine-Searcher.com
Bonus Information About Wine Mobile Applications & Wines
Here are your FAQ answers about wine apps and wines.
What is the best free wine app?
Well, if it’s an app for recording your tastings and sharing reviews, as the ranking here indicates, Vivino is the best free wine app, because its wine label scanner is the most accurate and complete given the sheer amount of data they have accumulated to feed their efficient software.
If you are after joining the biggest global wine community therefore benefit from the largest amount of user ratings on virtually every wine, Vivino is your answer as well.
Then for locating where to buy a specific wine, and for comparing wine prices, Wine-Searcher will be your best choice.
Is the Vivino app free?
Yes it is, absolutely. The subscription called Vivino Premium that used to give you access to more functionalities and faster scanner matching has been discontinued (in Novembre 2018 I believe). Here’s what Vivino says about it: “We are no longer offering Vivino Premium. After trialing Vivino Premium as a subscription model, we have decided to discontinue the program at this time as the economics are not viable for our business. Existing customers who have already signed up for Vivino Premium can use it through the end of their subscription, one year after their initial sign up.”
Buying wine on or through Vivino is not free though, obviously!
Which wine app is best?
Again, Vivino has got to take the tittle for me. It has proven to be the most successful wine app over time, gathering the most users, and delivering of lot of information. It is a shame the company is not providing as much content and therefore informative value to their customers as they used to.
Is there an untappd for wine?
No, there isn’t a literal Untappd app for wine unfortunately. No wine app allows you to check in at a place where you are consuming a wine. The Vivino app is as close as you can get to an Untappd mobile application for wine, because of the large size of its user community, and the Vivino app does include the option to tag a place when you are rating a wine in the system, but not many people seem to use it, and there are no particular functionalities built into the app around it to make consuming wine physically more social in the real world.
How do you scan a label on a bottle?
Many mobile wine applications now include a wine scanning feature. The apps use th built-in camera on your phone to identify the winery, the brand, and the name of the cuvée using the design of the labels, and sometimes also OCR technology (optical character recognition). So all you have to do, is open your app (like Vivino or Delectable), go to the wine scanning section, take a closeup picture of the label and a good app should be able to match your bottle to its database.
What are the top 10 wines?
Hard to tell which wines are the best in the world are. This is a very subjective matter. While price is not always directly correlated to quality, and the most expensive wines aren’t necessarily the best, one would consider high prices command very high quality, or at least is an expression of high demand for wines. So, here is a list of the Top 50 Most Expensive Wines in the World
What are the most popular wine brands?
Check out the Top 4 Wine Brands That are Killing it Online, this might answer your question.
What are the Best Wine Apps for iPad?
Wine apps for iPad are available through iTunes app store, and are the same as the ones for iPhone. All the apps listed above are available for iPhone, there they are also the best wine apps for iPad, and generally speaking for all tablets as well.
What were the Best Wine Apps 2017?
I do not now if we only started publishing this list lats year, but here is the list of the 2018 Top 10 Best Wine Mobile Applications.
Are Wine Apps Available for iPhone and Android?
Of course, most popular wine apps are available both for Apple and Android devices (Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Google Pixel, One Plus, Huawei, Oppo, etc.). Although, some publishers and developers generally favor iPhone users if they have to chose between the two platforms. It takes time and money to develop apps on both iPhone and Android, and developers are generally trained and specialized for coding only on one platform. iPhone users tend to spend more money online and in mobile apps, hence some publishers making their app only available on iPhones and iPads.
Which are the Best wine label scanning apps?
Famous Master of Wine Jancis Robinson’s team published a comparison of the best wine label scanning apps, but it’s been a few years already (test run in 2016), but if you are interested in the topic, here’s the article: Best wine label-scanning apps 2016
What is delectable app?
A very good wine rating and scanning app, see description in the corresponding section above.
Which Wine App is Worth Downloading?
All of the above Top 10 wine apps, given their functionalities as described correspond to your expectations and what you are looking for.
Related Read: 2018 Top 10 Best Wine Apps
Top Header image curtesy of Vivino.com
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