Transcript: Wine App Show. Are Vivino, Wine.com and Delectable actually useful?

- Sure, I'm just gonna agree with everything Aaron says here. Hi, welcome to another episode of "Lucky Rock Wine Lounge." I'm Jesse Inman, and remember, bald is beautiful.

- Beautiful. I'm gonna pretend to be Steve Jobs all episode.

- Cool, and today we'll be talking about wine apps.

- Buying wine can be kind of confusing. I mean, have you gone to the grocery store wine aisle lately?

- Yeah.

- There's like six types of diapers and like 9,000 wines.

- I know, it's crazy.

- It's very confusing. Most people on a Friday night just wanna cruise the aisle, find something that they want at a price they're willing to pay, go home and enjoy it. So hopefully we're gonna introduce a couple tools that'll make that experience a little easier. Apps can help you with a couple different things. One of them is finding wines similar to wines that you've enjoyed in the past. You can kind of catalog the wines that you've enjoyed.

- Through flavor profiles.

- Then there's food and wine pairings if you wanna go, oh, sweet. This goes with veal.

- Sweet. So we're gonna over three wine apps that we picked that we either thought or heard were the most popular and we'll kind of go through the different features and see which one's best and why.

- Yeah, and we're really gonna focus on like searching for wines and purchasing the wines. All right, it's that favorite time of the show where Jesse asks you to.

- Like and subscribe.

- Thank you. So to properly evaluate these wine apps, we are doing what most people do.

- We're gonna give them the old turn your head and cough. Yeah. What we did is we went to the Google play store and saw what were the most popular options on there and then from there we decided to select three that we were gonna focus on. Yep, that's right. We're Android people. The whole Steve Jobs things make sense now, right?

- Yep, and because I'm not super good at remembering stuff well. Aaron will list the criteria.

- Because we are from a small town.

- That's right.

- English.

- No, we don't speak so good.

- Yeah, you could pass with a C no problem.

- That's right.

- So all the apps on the list that we're gonna review, there's three of them. It has you search for wines. Can you find concise information about those wines? And then lastly, can you order those wines? Is the checkout pretty easy?

- Yeah, and so based on those criteria, we decided to review wine.com, Vivino and Delectable.

- All right. So tangibly, we're gonna compare and contrast these apps by trying to find a wine that is Pinot noir, fruit-forward, under $25. So it'll be really, we'll do a one to 10 scale. So like if the app is just super OG, 10, 10, 10, 10, it's gonna score 40 points.

- Yeah, and so we'll order the wine. We'll kind of show you, run through the app and then through YouTuber magic, the wine will magically appear and we will taste it and then confirm if it is in fact in the same realm we were looking for fruity, et cetera.

- [Aaron] Wine.com.

- [Jesse] Red wine.

- [Aaron] Red wine. A Pinot noir under $25. Red wine. Pinot noir.

- [Jesse] Region, California.

- [Aaron] California usually fruit forward. Okay. Look good there.

- [Jesse] Rating, price.

- [Aaron] Price, zero to $25. Even though $0 Pinot noir is not really good usually.

- [Jesse] Not good. I've had it before. Do we want more filters or no?

- [Aaron] No. Let's see if we can get into.

- [Jesse] Yummy, my favorite.

- [Aaron] Let's see. The one issue we're finding here is it's not really giving you the fruit forward, right? We kind of had to do that with just assuming California is a little bit fruit forward. So then no, keep going. I mean, that could be an option. Let's drill into one of these really quick just to see what it. Let's see what it.

- Sea Sun, oh, that looks like good for 89 points.

- [Aaron] 89 points. Winemaker notes are in here. Deep, alluring red wine. Wow, that's good. Rich fruit. Okay. So, I mean, there's not a ton of information, like right off the bat, about how fruity that is. It doesn't have any reviews. There we go. Let's give them a shot. There's a California Pinot from Monterrey. It's got some good scores. It's under twenty-five bucks. Winemaker notes, fruit forward expression. Okay, that's good. Critical claim, okay. That looks like a winner. It's Pinot noir, it's 25 bucks. It's fruit forward. And we just added it. So now we're trying to buy it. So we added it to the cart. So now we wanna check out. Go up to the carty-cart. And then this looks pretty easy. Order summary, $15 shipping.

- [Jesse] So the more you order, the shipping goes down in theory.

- [Aaron] And then we go to checkout. Boom, boom, boom. There you go. Fairly straightforward. Maybe the one knock that it was on there was not being able to really look at like the, until you drill down into the specific wines, you couldn't really see if it was a fruit forward pinot noir.

- [Jesse] Yeah, you can just read the notes and assume.

- Yeah, you kind of have to drill down. So, decent. Checkout with super easy. Searching was pretty easy other than that component of the fruit forward.

- Yeah.

- So this is the wine from wine.com, Talbott Kali Hart. Yeah, it's fruity. I like that. A lot of plum, cherry.

- Yeah. It's definitely not lean.

- So I would say for wine.com, the search-ability on wine was good. I was happy with that. I give it a nine.

- Sure.

- And then from there, with the information concise, that's where they fell a little bit flat for me because you did actually have to drill down into the individual wine to like get the tasting notes. So it was a little bit harder. It was good with the--

- It allows you to maybe judge the label and say, oh, that's interesting, I wanna go a little further. Which you're gonna get lost on maybe something like Sean Minor. It's little bit more of a subtle label. You might not be attracted to it. You have to know it or heard of it. And then maybe drill down more.

- And there were the critic scores which--

- That helps a lot.

- Third party endorsements. And then there was the actual community of people on wine.com that are reviewing it with their own star system. So those were really prevalent, but actually getting into the taste notes, like trying to find if it was a fruit forward wine, that was a little more challenging. You had to drill down into each wine. So maybe on there, I'm gonna give it like a seven.

- Sure, I'm just gonna agree with everything Aaron says here.

- And then from there, the checkout was really easy. I thought it was straightforward. Especially if you have a profile on there already and you've got like a card uploaded. Super easy checkout.

- And I've seen other apps, not necessarily these three, but other apps have used wine.com to fulfill their wine. So they have a pretty powerful backend.

- Yeah, pretty seamless. And then the wine, we were looking for a $25 Pinot noir, fruit forward. And I would say we got one.

- [Jesse] Yeah. Success.

- So overall, I would say that that's a 10 out of 10.

- [Jesse] Yeah, so now we're going to Vivino.

- [Aaron] Vivino.

- [Jesse] Okey-dokey.

- [Aaron] All right, we're gonna try the Vivino app now.

- [Jesse] So up here, we've got style. Say California Pinot.

- [Aaron] Same criteria. Pinot noir under $25, fruit forward.

- [Jesse] Twenty-five bucks. Boom, boom, boom, taste.

- [Aaron] Taste, that's pretty cool. You can actually. There's that sliding scale--

- [Jesse] Let's say a medium-bodied pinot.

- [Aaron] A wine similar to myself.

- [Jesse] Yes, smooth, very smooth myself.

- [Aaron] Medium bodied.

- [Jesse] Dry, yes, we want dry.

- [Aaron] Dry, oh, that's gonna exclude the Meiomi. Not.

- [Jesse] Soft to say, how about middle of the road. Just like everybody else likes. People like smooth lines. Done there. Regions, special vintage.

- [Aaron] And then we've got some pairings and other things up there. So we've been able to kind of do a little bit of sorting here now. So we've got some wines. Now we're looking for stuff under 25 bucks that looks like it's gonna fit the profile.

- So I know this one just over the years.

- Okay, let's give it a shot. We've got landed on Overlook, The Landmark Overlook Pinot Noir. Scroll down. Is there more information underneath it? Summary, great value for the money. So then it's got some highlights on the taste--

- It's a best seller in Oklahoma, that's nice.

- Oh, that's good to know. Cherry, strawberry, raspberry. 530 people have used that to describe the wine. That sounds fruit forward.

- [Jesse] Yeah.

- Red fruit, red berries.

- [Jesse] And these are individual people's ratings. That's kind of cool.

- [Aaron] So that's a lot of information.

- [Jesse] Cool, let's fire this bad boy up, huh.

- [Aaron] Okay, let's buy that wine.

- [Jesse] Buy it for 23.99. Add to cart, one bottle.

- [Aaron] Shipping, $19,000, what?

- [Jesse] That's a lot of money.

- [Aaron] All right, so that's the wine there. Pretty easy. Now we're gonna try to check out. So there's the order. Shipping options, and then place the order.

- [Jesse] Blah, blah, blah, yep.

- All right, we're not gonna go all the way through this and show you our credit cards, but that was pretty simple.

- Yeah.

- So I haven't had this wine for quite some time. I'm curious if it's still fruity.

- So I thought the search-ability on this one was solid. That one really, it had like the sliders, you were able to really get the wine style.

- 'Cause it's more than just fruity. It gives you soft, tannic. I'm curious if they line up in general, but we'll see.

- Yeah, I thought that was solid for sure. This one's definitely like, prunier. It's like very fruit forward, but you gotta like plum and it's a little more raisin-y, almost.

- I think we moved the slider over to the relatively soft side, and this is very soft and it's very fruity. So I would say it, and was like medium to low on the acid.

- Yeah.

- I'd say this is kind of spot on.

- Yeah, I would agree. So as far as search-ability goes, I would give it a 10. I thought it was pretty robust. As far as concise information.

- 10.

- It was pretty solid. We'll give it a 10.

- Yeah.

- The checkout was--

- [Jesse] Seamless.

- Pretty easy. The only thing I'll knock it a little bit is because they actually fulfill through wine.com. So it's not like their own system. So it is a little bit chunkier than actually doing it through wine.com.

- So we'll ding them a point.

- So we'll ding them. I'm gonna give them an eight. I'm gonna give them an eight.

- Cool.

- And then from there, as far as wine matching what we searched versus what we tasted--

- [Jesse] 10 out of 10.

- 10, so that was pretty solid.

- [Jesse] For sure. And we're gonna go Delectable.

- [Aaron] Delectable.

- [Jesse] Okay.

- [Aaron] $25 fruit forward Pinot noir.

- [Jesse] See, where'd we?

- [Aaron] Okay, so just even landing on the first interface. Okay, up there at the top I see a little search icon.

- [Jesse] Oh yeah.

- [Aaron] So we'll try that. We'll do packing Pinot noir. California. All right, so then it's just starting to spit us up kind of like a feed.

- [Jesse] It's almost like you have to kind of trust what they... 'cause don't really give it ratings per se. It's more social media aspect.

- [Aaron] It's almost like a feed a little bit and they do give you some ratings here and then you can check the price. Back to the very top there, my friend. There's a price rate, which is also.

- [Jesse] Does one mean $5 or $10?

- [Aaron] Yeah, yeah. J Lohr, Sean Minor. So drill into the Sean minor. Sonoma Coast Pinot. Again, we're looking for a fruit forward.

- [Jesse] We know old Sean.

- [Aaron] So it's under $25. It's Pinot noir. It's got some information from sipping fine wine. Has some information on it.

- [Jesse] And Ryan, I trust Ryan for sure.

- [Aaron] Ryan, fantastic wine, he said. Raspberry jam. Yep, that sounds fruit forward.

- [Jesse] Nice light Pinot. That doesn't sound jammy, but.

- [Aaron] Light doesn't mean anti-fruity.

- [Jesse] Okay, so again, you're just kinda trusting--

- [Aaron] So then, yeah, so then, yeah, okay. We're gonna go with this one. So then let's say we wanna buy it. Is it intuitive, buy. Okay, so then you've got, obviously the one vintage that we saw. It says you can buy.

- [Jesse] I'm 21 years or older. Yes I am.

- [Aaron] That's right, Peter Pan.

- [Jesse] One bottle. Address, that's my name. Okay, cool, blah, blah, blah.

- [Aaron] Okay, now one thing that's interesting here we're noticing is that when it says, confirm and pay, that's shipping from somewhere in Florida.

- [Jesse] Oh yeah.

- [Aaron] So that's kind of interesting. Whereas the other two--

- [Jesse] Ship from wine.com.

- [Aaron] The wine.com, when we were shipping from wine.com and the other one was actually fulfilled by wine.com, but you checked out in the app. So that's something to note here. You may be filling this out, trying to order the wine and then noticing that it's actually shipping from very far away.

- [Jesse] Yeah, and if it's hot outside that could be problematic.

- [Aaron] Hot outside or you needed this for the weekend and you're not gonna get it for five business days. So that's interesting, okay.

- [Jesse] Easy enough.

- [Aaron] Confirm and pay.

- [Jesse] Delectable.

- Delectable.

- We got Sean Minor's Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir 2019. And so this one I found it was a little harder to order off of if I remember correctly.

- The search-ability wasn't as intuitive as the other two. I felt like you did have to go up to that search bar at the top and type it in. And then it kind of came up with California, Oregon. And then from there, the searching for the price was a little wonky. And then it kind of came up almost more like a social media feed. So it was a little more challenging.

- Yeah, I feel like we had to rely on reading through people's reviews versus a condensed. It's not the end of the world, but it's a little bit more work.

- Yeah. So the search-ability on this one, I give it more like a six.

- Same.

- And then as far as concise information, the information is not so, 'cause it's kind of as concise as the people writing the reviews because that's really the super prominent part. So I would give that maybe a seven. And then as far as checkout, that could be tricky. If you're not paying attention, then you might be ordering a wine from Washington D.C. and you live on the west coast.

- Yeah, and you're not necessarily trusting wine.com to have it, fulfill it, et cetera. You're trusting this person to go get it from that person to send it to you, which could in theory, have another issue or two along the way.

- I agree. And then as far as the wine matching what we were searching for, yeah, t's pretty close. I would give this a solid nine. So to conclude this, I think the easiest to use was Vivino.

- Yeah, not even just easiest, but just more, it's just the right things in the right places at the right time, so to speak.

- And there's an intuitive thing too on these. I mean, full disclosure. I mean, I don't use wine apps all the time myself. The way I use it is really to help my memory with wines. Like I was mentioning at the beginning of the show, like when I see a wine, I'm not good with the French language. Sometimes I'm not good with the German language. And so when I'm drinking those wines and I enjoy them, I use those to take a picture of the wines and remember them. And then I might give them a little rating so I can remember if I liked it or not.

- Totally.

- And that's typically how I use it.

- We're giving Vivino the highest rating. We're were giving wine.com the second. And then we're giving Delectable the third rating. They all have their strong points and weak points, but considering what we were looking for.

- Yeah, for the criteria we were looking on, which is really searching for the wine, a specific wine, and then trying to buy it, Vivino got us to where we wanted to be with the most ease whereas wine.com did a pretty damn good job. And then Delectable, maybe good. Maybe you're not focusing. Maybe that's not the best use of that app.

- Yes, and sidebar, our favorite of the three wines was the Overlook. That was a nice, jammy, fruit forward, easy drinking wine.

- All right, so we suggest you get in that app store, whether that's Apple or Android, whatever you're comfortable with, poke around, see if there's some wine apps that work for you in there and increase your tech ability.

- Yeah, you got to go downtown to be downtown or something like that.

- Something like that. So we are gonna see our way out of this episode with a little bit of the Overlook.

- Yeah.

- 'Cause it was tasty and we'll see you on the next episode.