Seven apps to help you drink wine

After lots of practice, I’ve reached the stage where I can usually tell a good wine from a bad one. But there’s an awful lot of bluffing involved. If I’m asked for an assessment, I mutter something about ‘tannins’ and ‘structure’, while eyeing the bottle for the alcohol content and price. A good-looking label helps too: simple but classy, with a hint of grandi-loquence lurking at the periphery.

It’s people like me who are likely to benefit most from the spate of wine scanner apps hitting the market, challenging the expertise of wine buff show-offs. These apps analyse bottle labels and provide information about the wine, region, grapes, price and food pairings. For those keen to learn more about the industry, or fake a level of expertise they can never genuinely hope to possess, it’s a great idea — if, at the moment, rather a flawed one.

The apps I tested were Vivino, Delectable, Wine Searcher, Corkbin, Snooth Pro, Hello Vino and Drync.