{"id":458952,"date":"2026-05-25T10:37:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T10:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/458952\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T10:37:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T10:37:18","slug":"one-simple-app-has-completely-transformed-the-way-we-drink-has-it-been-for-the-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/458952\/","title":{"rendered":"One Simple App Has Completely Transformed the Way We Drink. Has It Been for the Best?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

These days, the phone has become a ubiquitous utensil of the table setting\u2014more commonly spotted beside the napkin than, say, the salad fork. Emily Post\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Wine lists can be so long and complicated that some restaurants call them \u201cwine books.\u201d 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\u2019s an app for that.<\/p>\n

In the world of wine, Silicon Valley and Napa Valley are most recently at odds over ChatGPT\u2019s algorithmic wine pairings<\/a>, 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<\/a> of over 2.7 billion label scans and over 280 million numerical wine ratings.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s the industry\u2019s magnum opus.<\/p>\n

Vivino has welcomed anyone with a phone into the fold of oenological esoterica, but what do the traditional gatekeepers think? There\u2019s 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<\/a> 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\u2019ve found that their feelings aren\u2019t 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. \u201cYou just cannot scale that business,\u201d Heini Zachariassen, co-founder of Vivino and now of Vota<\/a>, tells me of the wine criticism and guidance industry. \u201cThe 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\u2019s just a different scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that deep well of data, Vivino has developed a loyal community of wine lovers who won\u2019t buy a bottle until cross-referencing ratings, tasting notes, and price through the platform. The most prolific individual superusers at the top of Vivino\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The scale of Vivino\u2019s data is such that the outlier individual taste can be mathematicized away. One drinker\u2019s intolerance for tannins is accounted for in the standard deviation, while another\u2019s 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<\/a>, published in the Journal of Wine Economics in 2025, even concludes, \u201cVivino ratings are overall consistent with those from professional critics.\u201d Vivino\u2019s crowdsourced scores, the study notes, could in fact be used to identify meteorological events that occurred during the year of the vintage.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

\u201cVivino 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,\u201d Richard Hemming, master of wine and head of creative, Asia, for the prominent British wine critic Jancis Robinson\u2019s eponymous media platform<\/a>, tells me via email. \u201cHowever, it doesn\u2019t seem to have as much traction within the trade itself\u2014Vivino scores are rarely quoted or discussed between wine professionals, whereas individual critic scores still hold sway.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is not to say that professionals dismiss the app\u2019s influence. In 2015, when VinePair asked Robinson<\/a> what she thought about \u201ccritic killer\u201d apps like Vivino, she responded, \u201cLive and let live.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mandy Oser, the owner and wine director of Ardesia Wine Bar<\/a>, in Hell\u2019s Kitchen, says, \u201cI 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\u2019s not going to cut us out. It tees them up, and we can take it from there.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s list in the first place.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s 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\u2019s Ardesia opened before the 2011 launch of Vivino. \u201cWhen we first opened, I noticed more resistance to things that were less familiar,\u201d she tells me. \u201cPeople are getting more comfortable with trying things. We are about to add some wines from China, and I don\u2019t know if I could have pulled that off in 2009.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zachariassen agrees. \u201cThat\u2019s the upside of this,\u201d he says. \u201cIn 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u00e0 la Pok\u00e9mon? Either way, the technology is compelling drinkers to try things they otherwise wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

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\u2014its inconsistency and unpredictability. Vivino users love documenting wine because there is seemingly infinite diversity in a drink made from the juice of one fruit.<\/p>\n

At a more systemic scale, Vivino can\u2019t predict the weather in Chile next year. It\u2019s not supposed to. But the seasoned winemaker in Valpara\u00edso is tending to his vines, thinking about next year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Wine shops and wine bars will adapt to the times, selling p\u00e9t-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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat drives my decisionmaking around our wine is what is delicious, well made, and what we think should be introduced to the broader public,\u201d Oser says of Ardesia\u2019s approach to wine list curation. \u201cTech doesn\u2019t come into play for me in that place. I want to stand by everything we pour based on taste.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other side of the world, Vivino has opened a brick-and-mortar wine shop<\/a> 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\u2019d rather spend my Singaporean dollars at the Changi Airport duty free. While I appreciate the assistance when I\u2019m 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\u2019s rude to use your phone at the dinner table.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":458953,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[85,46,321,19390,125,213937,213938],"class_list":["post-458952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mobile","tag-professionals","tag-technology","tag-vivino","tag-wine-professionals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}