Clarification: On Snooth there are two million total reviews, 500,000 are from critics. I’m not sure why Lafite didn’t appear in searches, it may have been a glitch or user error. It does appear now, however.

Wine apps have come a long way in a short time. At first there were just electronic wine journals, which helped you keep track of what you had drunk, and or hoped to drink in the future.

But the apps have matured to a include an assembly of features that help you discover new wines and to find them in local stores, as well as to track the bottles you’ve had and those you covet.

If you are looking for information on a particular wine, the $4.99 Drync Wine Pro app may be your best bet. It claims to search about 10 databases including WineZap, Wine Searcher, and Snooth (which has its own app). Drync was the only search that turned up Lafite Rothschild; odd, considering it may be the world’s most famous Bordeaux. Despite the great data, searches are by keywords, which are fine for people who know what they are looking for, but not as good for discovering new wines. Drync does have three “best of” lists for shoppers, however, including Featured Wines, Most Popular, and Top Wanted. Pick a wine, and you can read what critics have said, or click to buy from an online merchant.

Snooth’s advantage is that it can not only help you find a wine you’ll like, but find a store near you that sells it. It’s sorted search makes it easy to discover new wines. The free app has four search fields, one for keyword, price, vintage and country. So you can look for a 2004 port under $30 from Australia. You can set Snooth to show results near you, in a different zip code, or you can shop a specific store. Snooth’s chief executive, Philip James, said the app searches 6,000 stores in the United States, and another 4,500 outside the country. Make sure your zip is entered and local search is on (I found localsearch sometimesturned itself off). You can learn more about specific bottles through 100,000 descriptions supplied by the winemakers, or two million reviews, a half million of those from critics (some may be just a score). Most reviews come from nonprofessional blog posts, which can be a little suspect. You can add your own ratings to the mix right from your phone, or store wine data into a wish list.

The $4.99 Wine Enthusiast Guide app, from The Wine Enthusiast magazine, focuses on bargain buys. It’s sorted search lets you pick by price (up to $100), rating, style, varietal, and region within a country. So you can look for a dessert Gewürtztraminer from Alsace rated above 85 points and costing less than $50 (there are three). You can add more than one region, varietal, or style to each search, and also restrict the search to use your criteria within to the magazine’s Editors Choice, Best Buys, and Cellar Selection picks. The app’s wine list comes from the magazine’s 71,000 reviews, which grow by about 1,000 a month. The built-in wine journal has three categories; Wines I Like, Wines to Buy, and Wine I Own. If you enable lists backup, your picks will be stored by the Wine Enthusiast. and if you are just getting started in wine tasting, the app has a reference section with a glossary and a wine primer. There is also a Windows version, and one for the Palm OS, but not the Palm Pre — yet.

Source: Gadgetwise