If you like to drink wine, which I bet you do, you will appreciate the Wine Enthusiast Guide app from MobileAge. With over 68,000 wine reviews and at least another 1000 added monthly, theoretically there is a good chance that you will find a description and rating for the wine you desire.

Searching for information on wines at my small town liquor store, I found that they were all reviewed in the Wine Enthusiast Guide (by the same experts who write for Wine Enthusiast Magazine, by the way). My experience was different when I looked up wines carried at a wine specialty shop; little-known wineries or unusual vintages seemed much less likely to be included in the Wine Enthusiast database.

Using the Wine Enthusiast Guide is fairly straightforward. You can look up wines by the wine name, brand, region or varietal. Since hundreds of wines could come up for a search, you can limit wines to certain price ranges and ratings, or to only those that fall into the “best buy” or “editor’s choice” categories.

As helpful as Wine Enthusiast Guide may be for reading wine reviews, it has some quirks. The touch-and-slide rating button was stubborn about sliding. When I scrolled through the wines too quickly, Wine Enthusiast Guide crashed. When I tried to look up all wines under $16 that were rated 100 points, just one wine came up (not unexpectedly) but its rating was 86 points. Narrowing the search fields was also a little awkward. For example, if I wanted to search exclusively for New York State wines, not only did I have to click on New York, I also had to remember to unclick the “All” button.

Wine Enthusiast Guide offers a way to store your wine wish list, a handy reference guide and some basic information about wines and wine tasting that it calls “Wine 101.” Lacking is a way to add your own wines, record tasting notes and catalog wines you have tried. Food pairings are also absent, as are wine label photographs which would ease the hunt for wines when shopping. Some of these features can be found with different wine apps such as Wine Snob.

While wine connoisseurs will not be impressed, novice wine drinkers who would simply like to know that the wine they are buying has a decent review will benefit from purchasing the Wine Enthusiast Guide.

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category: Drinking, Lifestyle