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These days, the phone has become a ubiquitous utensil of the table setting—more commonly spotted beside the napkin than, say, the salad fork. Emily Post’s feelings aside, this is for good cause. Oftentimes, a menu confronts the diner with unknown dishes, unpronounceable preparations, and, most notorious of all, an intimidating catalog of wine.
Wine lists can be so long and complicated that some restaurants call them “wine books.” Sommeliers are kept on staff to cultivate an expertise in global meteorology, geographical place names from six continents, and grape varietals that change identity between French, Spanish, and German. Do you know how much it rained in the Loire Valley in 2019? No. Do you know how the 2019 Left Bank Bordeaux cabernet sauvignon is tasting? Luckily, there’s an app for that.
In the world of wine, Silicon Valley and Napa Valley are most recently at odds over ChatGPT’s algorithmic wine pairings, but no technology has made as big a name for itself as Vivino. Founded in 2010 in Denmark, the application has gone on to be downloaded more than 70 million times. Its groundbreaking feature was a scanning software that could read wine labels. Since its launch, its scale has become unsurpassed. It has amassed a crowdsourced database of over 2.7 billion label scans and over 280 million numerical wine ratings.
The platform even claims to cover 17 million searchable wines today. A baffling figure, sure, but with hundreds of growing regions, dozens of grape varieties, thousands of producers, multiple wines per producer, and decades of vintages, the number of unique wines in the world surely tallies in the millions. Documenting them all seems impossible, but Vivino has come closer than anyone could have imagined. To use a wine pun, it’s the industry’s magnum opus.
Vivino has welcomed anyone with a phone into the fold of oenological esoterica, but what do the traditional gatekeepers think? There’s a huge professionally trained community equipped to judge, recommend, and taste wines. WSET alone, one of the largest wine education organizations, has educated about 1.5 million people since its founding. Has Vivino put them out of a job? Do consumers trust their online community on Vivino more than an IRL sommelier? Speaking to wine professionals, I’ve found that their feelings aren’t as bitter as you might think. The founders of Vivino, who came from a tech background and knew little about wine, entered a space typically reserved for professionals who have pored over hundreds of maps of distant wine regions and poured thousands of glasses of wine (only tasting and spitting, of course). But the technology has one highly disruptive advantage over a professionally trained palate. “You just cannot scale that business,” Heini Zachariassen, co-founder of Vivino and now of Vota, tells me of the wine criticism and guidance industry. “The entire institution of Robert Parker or Wine Spectator, for that matter, would maybe rate 20,000 wines a year. We get 100,000 ratings a day. So it’s just a different scale.”
With that deep well of data, Vivino has developed a loyal community of wine lovers who won’t buy a bottle until cross-referencing ratings, tasting notes, and price through the platform. The most prolific individual superusers at the top of Vivino’s global rankings have rated more than 10,000 unique wines each. A platform of this breadth makes even the longest wine lists seem trivial. A scan of any obscure bottle at the local wine shop will certainly result in dozens of written reviews and hundreds of numerical ratings.
The scale of Vivino’s data is such that the outlier individual taste can be mathematicized away. One drinker’s intolerance for tannins is accounted for in the standard deviation, while another’s overzealousness for zinfandel gives new meaning to the z-score. In other words, Vivino may actually be a good judge of good wine. One article, published in the Journal of Wine Economics in 2025, even concludes, “Vivino ratings are overall consistent with those from professional critics.” Vivino’s crowdsourced scores, the study notes, could in fact be used to identify meteorological events that occurred during the year of the vintage.
With an app as discerning as the James Sucklings of the world, wine professionals are navigating their day jobs knowing that consumers have instantaneous access to data on price point, taste, and value for any wine they might offer. Are they ever tempted to use it themselves?
“Vivino has certainly made a big difference for wine lovers, and its five-star rating system has comparable influence to those found on Google Maps, for instance: any score less than 4 out of 5 can make things a much harder sell,” Richard Hemming, master of wine and head of creative, Asia, for the prominent British wine critic Jancis Robinson’s eponymous media platform, tells me via email. “However, it doesn’t seem to have as much traction within the trade itself—Vivino scores are rarely quoted or discussed between wine professionals, whereas individual critic scores still hold sway.”
That is not to say that professionals dismiss the app’s influence. In 2015, when VinePair asked Robinson what she thought about “critic killer” apps like Vivino, she responded, “Live and let live.”
Mandy Oser, the owner and wine director of Ardesia Wine Bar, in Hell’s Kitchen, says, “I try to not have a knee-jerk negative reaction. I like to think about how this can enhance what we are doing. My view is that there is still a great deal of intimidation around wine. If it helps people cut through that and feel more empowered to talk about what wine they want, it’s not going to cut us out. It tees them up, and we can take it from there.”
In this way, Vivino sits at an interesting fulcrum in the wine industry, where consumer behavior and preferences matter, but only to a certain degree. Vivino can get tech-savvy drinkers to select a wine, but the wine has to be on the restaurant’s list in the first place.
While it’s impossible to point to Vivino as the exclusive determining factor, it seems that drinkers are warming up to an increasingly diverse selection of wines. Twenty years ago, tasting notes on Hungarian wine were rare; now they are available in just seconds, standing side by side with reviews of a Spanish Rioja. Oser’s Ardesia opened before the 2011 launch of Vivino. “When we first opened, I noticed more resistance to things that were less familiar,” she tells me. “People are getting more comfortable with trying things. We are about to add some wines from China, and I don’t know if I could have pulled that off in 2009.”
Zachariassen agrees. “That’s the upside of this,” he says. “In the old days, maybe people would buy the same wine if they knew it was good, but the younger generation is willing to explore because there is sort of a stamp of approval from different communities.” With its massive database, Vivino and other platforms that keep drinkers informed about new wines have helped democratize the industry, empowering consumers with information and reviews of off-the-beaten-path wines few magazines would have reviewed in the past.
France, Italy, and Spain still dominate the global export trade by volume, but new provenances are increasingly more common on wine lists in the United States: Hungary, Uruguay, Armenia. At times, countries even become trendy. Is it because consumers are better able to locate information on wines from these smaller places? Or are they more likely to try them because platforms like Vivino have gamified the collection of unique wines à la Pokémon? Either way, the technology is compelling drinkers to try things they otherwise wouldn’t.
On the other side of this equation, though, is the supply of wine. Where Vivino might claim to have superior data, that data is descriptive of an existing stock. The label needs to have been printed to be scanned, whether by app or A.I. And, I would argue, for all their strengths, any of these tech platforms will fall short of capturing the true allure of wine—its inconsistency and unpredictability. Vivino users love documenting wine because there is seemingly infinite diversity in a drink made from the juice of one fruit.
At a more systemic scale, Vivino can’t predict the weather in Chile next year. It’s not supposed to. But the seasoned winemaker in Valparaíso is tending to his vines, thinking about next year’s harvest. How can he work within the constraints of the weather, the land, the market, and his own resources to produce a wine of quality that he can sell at a profit? Every year, across the globe, tens of thousands of producers make these highly personal calculations, which infuse a bottle with a distinctive flavor. Eventually, critics and Vivino users will uncork their efforts and assign judgment, for better or worse.
Wine shops and wine bars will adapt to the times, selling pét-nats and orange wines because customers are asking for it, but only if the bottles are actually good. Every wine pro I spoke to espouses a clear if-the-juice-is-worth-the-squeeze mentality. Classic, well-made bottles will stand the test of time, and trained palates are still required at each step of the process to ensure that a good wine gets made in the first place.
“What drives my decisionmaking around our wine is what is delicious, well made, and what we think should be introduced to the broader public,” Oser says of Ardesia’s approach to wine list curation. “Tech doesn’t come into play for me in that place. I want to stand by everything we pour based on taste.”
On the other side of the world, Vivino has opened a brick-and-mortar wine shop in Singapore. It is only in this format that the platform can use its data to truly influence the supply, selection, and curation of wine. But the concept is algorithmic, reducing the contents of the bottle to the average score of Vivino users across the globe. I’d rather spend my Singaporean dollars at the Changi Airport duty free. While I appreciate the assistance when I’m struggling to select a vermentino to go with my scampi, I eventually need to put down the 70 million critics I hold in my hand. After all, it’s rude to use your phone at the dinner table.