Don't Drink the iPhone Wine Application!
BY OWEN MORRIS
Apple opened up their application store Friday on iTunes, letting owners of iPhones and iPod Touches download applications to their devices. Being an owner of the latter, this was a release I was extremely eager for.
A wine application seems like the perfect fit for the iPhone, which is able to hold a lot of information and disseminate it quickly within a very small package. I’m not going to drag a big wine book to the store but I will whip out my iPod touch. That’s why it’s sad to report that there is currently only one wine application available for the iPhone. Come on developers, you can come up with a dozen tip calculators but only one wine picking app?
This one application is called the Wine Snob and is developed by 9MMedia. For $2.99 they say you’ll get the information to “navigate the wine shops like a pro and seek the wine list with confidence.” Well, I plucked down my $2.99 and planned on using the Wine Snob to help me pick out the perfect gift wine for a party I had this weekend with relatives. I quickly learned that Wine Snob wasn't going to be much help. The information Wine Snob gives is so generic and so elementary, it’s laughable. For instance, here in its entirety is Wine Snob’s entry for Rose wines.
“Roses, also called blush wines, are light pink wines made from several red wine grapes. They get their color from a very short period of contact with the grape skins during the wine-making process. Roses are light and usually have some sweetness.”
That’s it. That’s the whole entry. The reason I’m not worried about copyright stealing for quoting an entire entry is that the Wine Snob admits to lifting their own entries from Wikipedia. In other words, I just paid three bucks to read shortened Wikipedia articles!
It’s the same with their information about different grapes and the wine quotes that come with the application might as well be lifted from the first Google result for “wine+quotes.” There’s absolutely no information about the differences in years, countries or regions nor is one actual bottle of wine listed.
It’s a dummy's guide to wine under the misleading name Wine Snob. If it were free, I wouldn’t care or be blogging about it, leaving you to find it for yourself. But to charge for this application is wrong. I wished I had saved my $2.99 for a bottle of Boone’s Farm.
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