We created a mobile app to help pick wines called Winescope

Hi everyone, we spent the past year creating a new mobile app that scans wine menus, has millions of wines, integrates a newsfeed of what friends are drinking and allows sharing of wine choices on Facebook/Twitter. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

App Name: Winescope
Summary: Scan a wine menu. Access millions of ratings. Pick a wine. A great wine choice could make or break an evening. When you take a photo of a wine menu with Winescope, you instantly get access to millions of ratings, retail prices and reviews. Never make an uninformed wine selection again!

Key features:
· Take a photo of a wine menu and automatically look up millions of ratings, retail prices, and reviews
· Share your wine selections with one click on Facebook and Twitter
· Never forget a wine with your Winescope Drink Log and submit your own ratings/reviews
· See the wines your family and friends are drinking, and know what to pick the next time you need a gift
· Buy wines from Winescope for yourself or as a gift from leading online retailers and have them shipped to your door

Platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry
Availability: Worldwide at http://www.winescope.co or your phone's app store.
Price: FREE

[Jenise]

Is this for real? Looks like an excuse for selling Yellow Tail, a product well below the interests of anyone on this board.

No affinity to Yellow Tail Please look past our poor choice of wine for the screenshots

Hopefully you guys will find better wine choices through the app!

Why do we need this app? Nothing wrong going into a store and looking around...then there is Wine Searcher.

Is this for real? Looks like an excuse for selling Yellow Tail, a product well below the interests of anyone on this board.

Jenise, do we still prefer real name policy here?

[Jenise]

Yes, bob, we do. I not sure why Robin allowed Winescope in under its commercial name.

I used to laugh at a guy I knew who went around with a 1-7 vintage chart in his wallet and would pull it out in restaurants and tell the sommelier "you are recommending a bad year". But this is much worse; scan the wine list; wait for a response; spend time fiddling around with the recommendations........ What's the sommelier for? And, in restaurants without a sommelier over here, there is usually someone, the owner, head waiter, to deal with essential queries, such as is it sweet or dry for Alsace or Loire whites? is the there a marked wood presence for reds? etc?

Additionally a decent sommelier, owner or head waiter knows his/her restaurant's menu and is worth listening to on good pairings, which are sometimes surprising. Computerised pairing recommendations can only be approximate.

BTW I find the descriptor "sour" too pejorative as a descriptor for marked acidity in many wines. Would "sour" be used to describe the strong but deliciously mouth watering acidity in last night's Maximin Grünhaus?

[Robin Garr]

Yes, bob, we do. I not sure why Robin allowed Winescope in under its commercial name.

Automatic Facebook login. It's a good thing overall, but if someone ignores Facebook's real-names rule and hasn't been banned by Facebook (yet ), our Facebook-registration system lets it through, too.

In this case, some of us do have questions about the quality of the app, but to her credit, Winescope posted only once, and is responding to our questions, so I don't see this as a zero-tolerance issue. Yet.

I used to laugh at a guy I knew who went around with a 1-7 vintage chart in his wallet and would pull it out in restaurants and tell the sommelier "you are recommending a bad year". But this is much worse; scan the wine list; wait for a response; spend time fiddling around with the recommendations........ What's the sommelier for? And, in restaurants without a sommelier over here, there is usually someone, the owner, head waiter, to deal with essential queries, such as is it sweet or dry for Alsace or Loire whites? is the there a marked wood presence for reds? etc?

Additionally a decent sommelier, owner or head waiter knows his/her restaurant's menu and is worth listening to on good pairings, which are sometimes surprising. Computerised pairing recommendations can only be approximate.

BTW I find the descriptor "sour" too pejorative as a descriptor for marked acidity in many wines. Would "sour" be used to describe the strong but deliciously mouth watering acidity in last night's Maximin Grünhaus?

I wish it were that way here, Tim. A lot of middle- to lower-priced restaurants will have a wine list of some sort but no one who knows anything of substance about them. I have no opinion regarding this app's ability to remedy this situation, but it can be a problem and particularly so if you're not a full-on wine geek.

[Jenise]

Mike makes a good point, as does Tim. To be honest, I didn't even notice the smooth vs. sour range on acidity--a Criticism I agree with--because I was instantly turned off by the first category being sweetness and That accounting for a third of the rating value. Then I saw the Yellow Tails (which suggests something to me, perhaps wrong, about how this 'free' app will be monetized). All in all, this app is aimed at Nongeeks who find all the choices on a wine list more confusing than exciting. As Mike points out, those peoples exist. But they're not the people on this board.

I used to laugh at a guy I knew who went around with a 1-7 vintage chart in his wallet and would pull it out in restaurants and tell the sommelier "you are recommending a bad year". But this is much worse; scan the wine list; wait for a response; spend time fiddling around with the recommendations........ What's the sommelier for? And, in restaurants without a sommelier over here, there is usually someone, the owner, head waiter, to deal with essential queries, such as is it sweet or dry for Alsace or Loire whites? is the there a marked wood presence for reds? etc?

Additionally a decent sommelier, owner or head waiter knows his/her restaurant's menu and is worth listening to on good pairings, which are sometimes surprising. Computerised pairing recommendations can only be approximate.

BTW I find the descriptor "sour" too pejorative as a descriptor for marked acidity in many wines. Would "sour" be used to describe the strong but deliciously mouth watering acidity in last night's Maximin Grünhaus?

I wish it were that way here, Tim. A lot of middle- to lower-priced restaurants will have a wine list of some sort but no one who knows anything of substance about them. I have no opinion regarding this app's ability to remedy this situation, but it can be a problem and particularly so if you're not a full-on wine geek.

That's a fair point, Mike. I guess that if I found myself in a mid-low priced US restaurant of the sort you refer to, I too wouldn't know what to order having little knowledge of US wine other than the more obvious and highly priced Californian names. I'd probably opt for beer in the absence of advice.