Megan Berry is an evangelist for Mobclix, the industry’s largest mobile ad exchange, working on social media and marketing. She also blogs at The Huffington Post and the Mobclix blog. You can follow her on Twitter as @meganberry, or through the @Mobclix handle.
Unsure about mixing your iPhone with wine? Well, if you’re a true vinophile, the iPhone is an amazing device to keep you more connected to your wine. The following list of top wine apps on the iPhone will convince you that mixing the two is worth the risk of spilling some pinot noir on your phone. Like wine itself, these apps vary in price and quality, and many still have a ways to go in terms of functionality. But the five awesome apps on this list will help you find, choose, taste, pair, and collect wines.
Think I missed an important one? Nominate it in the comments!
1. Hello Vino
For those who aren’t quite wine snobs, but wish they were, this app will help you fake it ’til you make it (stealthy use of iPhone required). If you don’t know which wine goes with which types of food, what wines are best for what occasion, or how to pronounce Sauvignon Blanc then this is the right app for you.
Perfect for every wannabe wino out there, Hello Vino will make choosing the right wine easy. Pick the type of food you’re having or the occasion and then choose whether you’d like a red, white, rose, sparkling, or sweet wine. Sophisticated wine connoisseurs will find this app beneath them, but those with less experience with the vines will find its lack of complexity just right. Hello Vino can help you pick whether you should get a chardonnay or a malbec, but look further if you want an app to help you determine which specific wine to buy. The best part? It’s free, a rarity for wine apps.
Cost: Free
2. Pair It!
The ultimate wine snob must have not only drink the best wine, but pair those wines perfectly with the food they’re eating. Pair It!, created by a wine pairing expert from Sonoma county, encourages users to shake their iPhones to find a random pairing, or figure out the perfect pairing for the food or wine they already have by entering into the app. In case you doubt the true wine snobbery of this application, you should be aware it takes into account relative weights, flavor bridges, and elements of taste to find the perfect match. In other words, this app knows wine.
Cost: $2.99
3. Fromage
No good wine tasting would be complete without cheese. Fromage is your pocket guide to over 650 types of cheeses. You can rate cheeses and mark your favorites. Each cheese comes with descriptions of flavor and suggested wine pairings. A fairly simple app, but a must for any wine (and cheese) lover.
Cost: $2.99
4. Drync Wine
Much like the name implies this app will help in almost every step of the process of drinking wine. With a database of well over a million wines, you should be able to find the one you’re looking for. Drync Wine was born out of the developer’s own desire to track the wines he was drinking.
Once you’ve found your wine, you can take tasting notes, rate it, and add a photo of the label so you remember it. This will get saved to your virtual cellar so you can keep track of the wines you’ve tasted. Drync Wines replaces those cheesy wine tasting journals and does it cleanly and simply. Furthermore, they recently released a free version that lets you try before you buy (you can only keep up to 10 wines in the free version).
Cost: Free / $4.99 (the link above is to the Pro version)
5. DrinkFit
DrinkFit provides nutritional information for different varieties of wine so you can get an idea of how many calories you’re drinking with your dinner. A fairly simple interface make it pretty easy to find the wine you’re drinking and get a calories count. Note, however, that this app does not measure the calories of specific vintages just the difference between, for instance, the average calorie count of a pinot noir versus a pinot gris.
It also contains calorie counts for other types of alcoholic beverages such as, beer and cocktails, but I’m sure you always drink wine, right?
Cost: $1.99
Honorable Mentions:
Wine Snob: ($3.99) A solid wine tasting log and wine database.
Cellar: ($0.99) It allows you to visually keep track of your wine collection.
Wine Ph.D.: ($4.99) The wine ratings are helpful, although the database is less than complete.
Cor.kz Wine Info: ($3.99) This is a fairly complete app with a wine database, wine tasting notes, cellar management, and wish lists.
More iPhone resources from Mashable:
- iPhone TV: Top iPhone Apps for Live Streaming Television
– Top 10 iPhone Apps as Judged by Mashable Readers
– 7 iPhone Apps That Can Save Lives
– 15 iPhone Apps to Tame the Kids
– 20 Creative Apps For Your iPhone<
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, zoom-zoom
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