In the last of this two-part series on wine apps, Spanish Wine Lover sifts through hundreds of options and selects the 10 most interesting and attractive ones to download onto your smartphone or tablet.

Delectable

Available for iPhone, iPad
Free.
Languages: English
If you want to know what’s in the glass of American wine professionals such as Californian producer Rob Mondavi or Madeline Puckette, the blogger behind Wine Folly, this is the app for you. The company says it has two million wines stored in its database. Intuitive and with a sleek design, Delectable lets users share information easily and cross-post to Facebook and Twitter.

It works in a similar way to Vivino. Both identify a wine through a wine bottle label and allow users to rate it with an easy-to-use scale as well as post and read comments from other drinkers. If a bottle grabs your attention -there is a large selection of Spanish wines- you can purchase it directly from Delectable and have it delivered to your home, although this option is only available for US-based users.

The information is less exhaustive than Vivino’s, but Delectable seems to be more accurate and has less duplicated wines. Although identification is quick -it had no problems to find Bernabé Navarro’s natural wine as well as Garnatxa Fosca del Priorat- Delectable failed to recognise artistic labels or some small production wines. Unlike Vivino, it does not allow to introduce data manually so Delectable may take some time to check and load the information, which at times is incomplete. It was the case when we added Raig de Raim, a blend of Garnacha, Carignan, Merlot and Syrah from DO Terra Alta - it classified it as “red blend” without identifying any of the varieties. Aware of such problems, Delectable plans to introduce some improvements shortly.

As in Vivino, the Foursquare search tool to find where users are drinking their wines is ineffective and comes up with a long list of irrelevant locations, although this step is easy to ignore on Delectable. 

This app is not available for Android phones. Another drawback for non-English speakers is the language - English is used by 90% of its users and translations are not available.

Drync

Available for iPhone, iPad and Android
Free
Languages: English
A sleek design and good photographs are two of the attractions of this app. It is interesting for US-based users, who have the option to find out wine prices in their state and purchase them at a cost that seems comparable to retail prices. It might not be that useful for users based in other countries; the number of Spanish wines in Drync’s database is smaller than in apps such as Delectable or Vivino, and it is only available in English.

It works in a similar way to other apps: users scan the label, rate it from one to five, write down their notes and Drync locates the wine among the 1.7 million bottles in its database. In our search, it failed to find rare or small-production labels -no matches for our Garnatxa from Priorat, the natural wine and Malvasía El Grifo from Lanzarote. When this happens, Drync searches its database and later sends you the information. This, however, might not be an option if you are impatient - it took two days to come back with our results.
Its Collections section includes suggestions such as “Red wines for white wine lovers” or “Barbecue wines”. This last segment features two Spanish wines (Martín Códax Albariño and Jaume Serra cava) but they are isolated cases in a range of wines dominated by selections from France, Italy and California. An added problem is the lack of basic information for many of the Spanish wines in Drync’s database (the file on Dominio do Bibei Lalama does not include vintage, variety nor tasting notes).

Developers are working to improve recommendations, making them more tailored to users’ tastes and interests.

Wine-Searcher

Available for Android, iPhone and iPad
Free
Languages: English
It is a database with over five million wines which also lists retailers -many of them online- where wine can be purchased, average cost and price history graphs. Expert ratings are also listed as well as the popularity of a particular wine in the Wine-Searcher website.

Its accuracy is spot-on: it found every single wine we tested. Additionally, it has a special section for different vintages, with points, price and retailers where wines are available. Two minor downsides are the lack of information in terms of varieties -Juve y Camps Reserva de la Familia is just “Cava Blend”- and its basic design. Nevertheless, the quality and quantity of information stored in Wine-Searches compensates for that.

Snooth 

Available for iPhone, iPad and Android
Free. Pro Version: 4,49€
Languages: English
The free version of this app does not let you take a picture of the label so the whole experience feels rather outdated on an interface with adverts and dull colours. Despite the lackluster design, the search functionality works well and filters results by colour, country, variety, price and style. Once the wine is located, it displays professional and amateur reviews as well as information about other selections from the same producer and from the region where it comes from.

Although its database stores a vast number of wines, Spanish brands are hard to find, even internationally established ones, and only displays old vintages. One interesting feature -if you live in the US- is that it shows prices and lists stores near your location. For countries outside America, there a few results.

Dastagarri

Available for Android, Amazon and Kindle Fire
Free
Languages: English, Spanish and Basque
It is neither the prettiest nor the most complete, but Dastagarri appears on this list because it has been lovingly designed by a wine aficionado with little means and no traces of Californian technology or financial support. Iñigo de la Iglesia just wanted to learn more about wine; none of the apps available on the market suited his needs entirely so in 2012 he decided to have a go. He wanted to create something useful for himself, but he figured that if his app managed to helped others, he could benefit from the wine information they would enter into his app. Despite his lack of programming knowledge and learning on the go, he launched Dastagarri, which aims to be, he jokes, “the world’s biggest database in the world”.

Until then, Dastagarri -which means delicious or tempting in Basque- is an app for wine geeks. Despite its rudimentary interface, it allows users to keep a record of their purchases with pictures, personal tasting notes and ratings, check a thesaurus, translate terms, import files from other users and even recover a copy in case you change or lose your mobile phone. Punctilious geeks can even record any gadgets used on the tasting (aerator, decanter, vacuum pump), a picture of the cork and the brand and type of glass used. 
Dastagarri has been downloaded by around 850 people, says Iñigo. He knows it is a tiny drop in the ocean of figures at Silicon Valley, but he is happy and focused on introducing further improvements such as a new web app that could be viewed on PC, Mac and mobile devices as well as a link for producers to upload their wine data for free.

Another Spain-based app is Vinthink. Available on iPhone for free, it can be downloaded in English, Spanish and Catalan. According to its creators, they have 59,000 wines from 11,000 wineries worldwide and a modest representation of Spanish brands to which users add, comment and recommend the wines they have tasted. It is structured as a social network, with a timeline where users can interact with each other as well as keep abreast of wine tastings and events in their area. That is, at least, the theory. The timeline does not show much activity and our search only found events in Catalonia, where the app developers are based. The idea behind this app is good, but there are some key usability problems such as the impossibility to edit stored wines to add a photo or correct a typo in the tasting notes. It struggles to find many wines, even from well known brands.