Choosing Wisely by Consulting the Sommelier in Your Pocket By BOB TEDESCHI

September 10, 2009
Phone Smart
Choosing Wisely by Consulting the Sommelier in Your Pocket By BOB TEDESCHI

Shopping for wine is a lot like parenting a teenager. You feel stupid when you’re in the middle of it, and when you finally emerge, you’re desperately ready for a drink.

There is, alas, no app for raising teenagers. But mobile software developers have begun aiming at oenophiles, and in so doing, they have established one of the more useful categories of wireless apps.

Appropriately enough, choosing the right one can be puzzling and tedious. Some of the refined entries in the current vintage include Cor.kz ($4), Wine Enthusiast Guide ($5), Nat Decants Food & Wine Matcher ($3) and Pair It! ($3). I’d give them a rating of 85, with an asterisk. They’re fairly good now, and they should age nicely.

Before digging into the details, though, consider the overall value of these services for a moment. Let’s say you’re at your favorite wine shop with about 15 minutes to spare, and you want a bottle that will make your dinner guests coo, without maxing out your credit card.

The shop owner is helping someone near the Mouton Rothschild, and the other employees are 23-year-olds with extensive beer-stocking skills. Rather than choosing a random bottle or asking the beer guys, you can now just reach for the sommelier in your cellphone.

From there you have a couple of options. Some apps, like Wine Enthusiast, let you find the most highly rated wines at specific price levels, so you can quickly browse the store — or, if you’re in a restaurant, the wine list — for matches.

If you have Cor.kz or, to a lesser extent, Nat Decants, you can reverse the process, and look through the wine list or shelves until you find a promising label. Then it’s a matter of doing a quick check on its rating.

The second approach has limits, simply because it takes too long to type in, say, “2003 Hochheimer Königin Victoriaberg Riesling Beerenauslese,” to say nothing of the time it might take to click through the ratings and then move onto another bottle.

Smartphone mavens are already wondering why you can’t just use the phone’s camera to scan the bottle’s bar code and have the app display the wine’s rating? In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to get fairly close to that bit of grape-soaked geekery, thanks to a new feature from Cor.kz.

But first, more about the core features of this app, which will soon be available to BlackBerry users and owners of Android devices like T-Mobile’s MyTouch 3G.

Cor.kz stands on the shoulders of an Internet giant, CellarTracker.com, which houses more than a million reviews by roughly 82,000 wine aficionados. Cor.kz can also help users manage their wine cellar inventory, but it is perhaps best used by those who just want to buy more intelligently.

Type in the name of the wine you are considering — Del Dotto, say — and Cor.kz retrieves everything in CellarTracker’s data base about the wine.

This can be a blessing and a curse. Wines from Del Dotto, a small but much-beloved vintner in Napa Valley, Calif., yield 581 tasting notes. If you type something more specific into your iPhone, like “2005 Del Dotto Cabernet,” Cor.kz returns 95 matches.

Some of these results include a numerical rating. To save yourself wasted clicks, choose those listings. The rating represents the average from CellarTracker’s reviewers, and those entries will also include detailed reviews and retail prices.

The bar code scanning feature, cool as it sounds, will have handicaps. Wine makers often use the same bar code for every vintage, and some makers allow distributors to paste different bar codes on the bottles. Still, with this method, users should at least be able to retrieve a short list of bottles from which to choose.

The Wine Enthusiast Guide is simpler to navigate than Cor.kz, but it is much less comprehensive, with 73,000 wine reviews in the database. Del Dotto, as well as other wines like Educated Guess from Roots Run Deep Winery, are two examples of wines that the app overlooked.

To be fair, though, the Wine Enthusiast reviews cover many of the most widely sold wines, as well as a fair selection of lesser-known vintners.

When you type the name of a wine, the search results are nicely arrayed, with the maker’s various wines listed on the first page. Click through to a specific type of wine — like, say, the Lancaster Estates Cabernet Sauvignon, and the app offers a review and a rating for specific vintages.

The app also offers users the ability to select specific criteria — like price, rating and varietal — and browse a list of wines that qualify.

That feature is at the core of another wine-related app, Nat Decants, which is available on iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android devices, like the MyTouch 3G. But this app belongs in a different subset of wine-related software — those that help users pair wine with food.

Nat Decants is the creation of Natalie MacLean, a wine journalist and registered sommelier, and includes much of the information available on her Web site, Nat Decants (at NatalieMaclean.com). To use it, select from a drop-down menu of either food or wine, and the software offers you suitable options from nearly 400,000 food and wine pairings.

It only goes so far, in that you are given, for instance, 18 wine varieties that go well with lobster. If you want to drill down and read reviews on specific wines, you must click through to Ms. MacLean’s Web site and purchase a monthly subscription for about $2.

Ms. MacLean said she hoped to integrate her reviews into the app in the future, but in the meantime users who have a poor cellular connection will find this additional step a source of frustration.

To get pairing suggestions from the kitchen instead of the bar, consider Pair It! (on iTunes only), created by Bruce Riezenman, a chef based in Sonoma County, Calif. Compared to Ms. MacLean, Mr. Riezenman offers more context around his suggestions, which will help you refine your own choices.

I was initially surprised that, of the services I tested, none suggested the best wine to pair with a specific occasion — like, say, reaching the end of school vacation. But maybe that would be silly; the best choice for that, clearly, is the first bottle you can get your hands on.

Quick Calls

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