Our favorite app these days is Vivino. Its slogan is  “Never Pick Another Bad Wine” — and the process is very simple.

All you have to do is download the free app, and then use your smartphone or tablet to take a photo of the label on a bottle of wine. Vivino then scans through its database, and in seconds you will be shown details about the wine, including ratings, reviews and prices.

The information comes from Vivino’s 13-million users – making it the world’s largest community of wine drinkers. The app is easy to navigate, and also offers articles, regional guides and suggestions about where to buy wines nearby.

We use Vivino in so many ways; here are some recent examples:

1. During a December trip to Washington, D.C., we wanted to pay corkage for a nice bottle of wine to celebrate a special event at an upscale restaurant. We went to a liquor store near our hotel and found a few bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon from four wineries we recognized. But we hadn’t tasted any recent vintages from those wineries, so we didn’t know which wine to buy. We took photos of the labels of all four bottles, read and compared the Vivino reviews and voila, it was easy to make a decision.
2. Our friends had us over for dinner and poured several excellent wines. We wanted to remember our favorites, so out came Vivino. We took photos of the bottles, rated them and wrote notes to refer to later on. We will never forget another bottle of wine, thanks to Vivino.
3. We were at Costco and decided to buy a few bottles of our favorite good-value red. We had enjoyed the 2012 vintage, but this time Costco only offered the 2013. So we took a photo with Vivino and found that the 2013 vintage was rated higher than the 2012. Out came our wallets!
4. We went out for dinner with friends and didn’t recognize some of the offerings on the restaurant’s wine list. (We know many wines from Washington state, Oregon, California, British Columbia, France, Australia and New Zealand, and several from Italy, Spain, Argentina and Chile, but we’re not as familiar with wines from Germany, Portugal, Austria, South Africa and other countries.) So we scanned the restaurant’s wine list to see the ratings and reviews, and then made a decision about which ones to pair with our meals.
5. Vivino also works with U.S. wine retailers to provide exclusive, discounted offers on high-quality wine to its users. We recently ordered four bottles of an excellent Cab Sauv from Napa Valley at a good price point. An extra bonus: shipping is often free when you purchase a few bottles.

Vivino also has social media attributes, so you can follow friends who use the app and see what they are drinking and enjoying. You can even like or comment on their reviews.

Of note, Vivino has excellent label recognition software and mostly gets labels immediately correct. But occasionally a different vintage or a different variety might be displayed from that same winery — when that happens, there is a super easy way to change it, and the correct label quickly shows up. And if the app can’t automatically identify a wine, Vivino’s team will manually do so for you — although it takes more than a few seconds.

You don’t have to wait as long if you upgrade to Vivino’s paid premium feature ($49.99), which fast-tracks the manual process for your unidentified labels. Another plus of the premium feature is cellar management. If it’s hard to remember where a specific bottle is located in your cellar (or in your wine coolers or wine racks), Vivino can help you out there too.

So whether you are an expert, enthusiast or simply enjoy wine, Vivino can help you find the best ones and remember them.

Vivino also recently released its 2016 Wine Style Awards, which you can read more about in our next blog post.

Cheers!
Margot and Dave