Learn to speak wine

Becoming a wine expert is as simple as downloading an app on your Android smart phone.

Wine Expert Dictionary is quite simply an app for Android, designed to provide the user with a full-on glossary and dictionary, helping him or her to gain knowledge about anything and everything to do with wine. If you’re a budding wine connoisseur then this is one to try out, free for download off of the Android market.

Instead of just vaguely reading the flavours on the back of the bottle, you’ll actually understand what kind of wine you are buying every time you step into a bottle store. The interface is really simple with a white search engine if you need help, a Grape tab, a Term tab, a Food tab, a Wine tab and the Exit tab. Considering this app is all about wines, I think the developers could have gone a little further in terms of the interface. It is quite bland and personally, when I am dealing with wine, I’d like the content to look aesthetically pleasing.

If you go into the Grape tab, you’ll find a selection of different types of wines. Click on one and you’ll get a description of the types of grapes used in the making of that particular kind of wine as well as what flavours they produce. For example a Cabernet Sauvignon is described as, “Deep ruby colour, black currant cedar nose, full-bodied, tannic when young.” I found this quite useful and interesting, allowing me to actually understand the difference between certain types of wines as well as what those differences are in detail.

The Food tab is one of my favourite features when it comes to this app, describing how wines influence certain meals and why. This is broken down into a glossary with explanations. You’ll learn how alcohol can magnify the heat of spicy food as well as how acidity in wine and food can cancel each other out.

Unfortunately the rest of this app fell very flat, with very little development, contents or features. For an app with such a huge potential, this was largely disappointing. The app promises food pairing advice and while there were general nifty tips when it comes to food and wine, I couldn’t find any solid advice depending on what wine I’m going to be drinking with my meal. Nothing happened when I tried to use the Wine tab or the Term tab, so I’m not quite sure what they are meant to do. The interface was also dull and not very interactive, making it very easy to simply uninstall and search for a wine dictionary online – far more interesting.

I would give this app a 2-star rating and recommend that you give it a skip. I hope the developers will come back to it and give it a flash make-over, adding features and making it far more appealing to Android users. It has so much potential to be a really great, interesting and useful app for wine lovers everywhere. The developers just need to come to the party.

Current Version: 2.0
Requires Android: 1.6 and up
Updated: 8 September 2010
Category: Everyday
Size: 185k
Price: Free
Developer: Bede Products