Top 10 free wine apps

Plonk

Plonk is a brilliantly simple app for helping the novice wine lover decipher their favourite wine styles and grapes.

It features an interactive guide to every major grape variety in the world alongside a brief explanation of its origins, tasting notes, as well as helpful pronunciation audio bites.

Users can mark each wine variety with a rating in a ‘tried and tasted’ section, and search for wines by their country, style or recommended food pairing.

Vivino Wine Scanner

Take a picture of any wine and the Vivino Wine Scanner promises to identify it from its database of more than 2 million wines giving you information on its average price, tasting notes, winery, rank, food pairing and grape variety.

If the app doesn’t find a match for your picture, the team behind the scenes will manually identify it.

Vivino was founded in 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and now has offices in San Francisco, Ukraine and India.

Wine Society

The Wine Society is one of the UK’s leading wine merchants and is a not-for-profit co-operative owned solely by its members. Its app is a one-stop shop for wine information featuring a how to buy guide taking users through the different wine styles and grapes by country and region, as well as food matching advice and vintage charts from 1985 to present. It also features an A-Z guide of commonly-used wine terms, phrases and acronyms.

Users can then search through its full range of wines to make their any purchases direct from the app.

Wine Notes

Never lose track of your wine again with this virtual tasting app which allows you to make a note of the wines that you love, hate and are still in search of.

Keep an inventory of your wine collection, search for wines using a barcode scanner and store photos and flavour profiles of wines you have tasted.

Delectable

Similar to the Vivino app, Delectable allows a user to take pictures of a wine which is then automatically identified from its database.

The app identifies the vintage, winemaker and wine name of any picture stored in its database, allowing you to add a rating and tasting notes which are then shared across the app’s social network.

WSET Wine Game

The official Wine & Spirit Education Trust game gives the ardent wine students a chance to test out their knowledge of the world’s wines in a fun and interactive way. Work through each level of the app to test and expand your knowledge on the origins of different wines and grape varieties.

The Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) was founded in 1969 to provide education and training in wines and spirits. Since then, it has grown to become the foremost international body in the field of wines and spirits education.

WSTA Trade Diary

Invaluable for anyone working within the drinks trade, the Wine and Spirits Trade Association (WSTA) diary app lists all the main wine and spirit trade events taking place across the UK, including tastings, seminars, exams and awards.

Keep track of events wherever you are and synchronise dates to your smartphone’s own calendar.

Berry Brothers & Rudd

Berry Bros. & Rudd is Britain’s oldest wine and spirit merchant, having traded from the same shop in London’s St James’s for over 314 years. Its app connects you to a list of more than 4,000 wines alongside tasting notes and maturity guides.

While you can buy wines through the app, it is also a place to come for information on a huge variety of regions, producers, vintages and prices in various currencies. Link through to the Berry’s Virtual Wine School for advice on tasting technique, food matches and how to serve wine.

WeinStein Sommelier

For the food lover – Weinstein Sommelier puts a wine expert in your pocket using artificially intelligent software to carry out real time wine and food pairing.

Simply tell the app what you are eating and the app will calculate a perfectly matched wine, and visa versa.

Wine Searcher

The Wine-Searcher app connects you to a database of more than 5.5 million wine prices and offers from 40,000 retailers worldwide from the popular wine-searcher.com website.

Search for any wine and the app will tell you where it is available, what different stores are charging and those nearest to you. It will even give you details on the wine’s origin, grape variety and price history as well as informing you which other vintages of the wine are available, alongside the tasting notes of wine critics.