Swirl Pro v2.6 by Kollifay
87 out of 100

Published Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Overview

Swirl has now been around for almost two of years (version one was releases Feb2010) and was one of the first wine apps to be available in the Android Market. The app has four key parts. It is a log of the wines you like or not, a store locator, a review of wines and a dictionary of common wine varieties.

The review of wines is driven by the Snooth website, which has an active community of wine lovers, with lots of reviews from both the enthusiast and the professional. Searching for wines is not as easy as say Snooth, but if you are willing to type in enough information about the wine you are interested in, you can get access to Snooths excellent information.

When entering a wine you have two options. You can select a wine by searching for it, then adding your own tasting notes. Often a photo is already available from Snooth and your rating is added to all the other information such as notes on the winery. Strangely some information appears from Snooth on the app, that is not in the main web interface.
If I am going to spend time entering wine notes I want to be able to back them up. Swirl allows for backing up of you information and photo to the SD card on your phone but not auto sinking to the cloud. Once backed up you can copy the files to you computer in the rather strange directory of com.kollifay.swirl. Images and the main export file can be backed up. But Swirl stores the files in a format that cannot be simply opened and read. It is unlikely many people will do this, so if the phone is lost so are your notes.

Recording your comments can be done by free format texts, ratings can be out of 5 stars or 100. The option is up to you. Tags can be added using:- like it, dislike it or several other pre-formatted tags. But you can create your own tags if you wish.

If Swirl recognises the grape variety it will suggest food pairings but this is very general for instance:- grilled salmon, chicken or lamb for Pinot Noir. Food and wine pairings are more complicated than the Swirl app can cope with, which is understandable. But a starting point for the uninitiated.

The store locator appears to use the phones GPS, Google maps, and a key word. The default search term is wine shop. This is very simple and misses all the supermarkets near where I live that sell wine. But if you wanted to change the search term you can in the settings. But you are better off going to maps app and doing your own custom search.
Finally the descriptions of grape varieties are very limited with only 25 of the most common varieties, a short paragraph and some common aromas. Useful yes, but not comprehensive.

Swirl as an app for entering wine tasting notes is useful but the lack of easy back up of the device is a worry. Using Snooths database to source reviews is very good, but it is slow searching for a wine. Once you have it, it does make entering your tasting notes better. The store locator is limited and only marginally more convenient than using Google maps but with less flexibility. For the causal user it is fine I tested the pro version at $3.99, I would suggest you try the free version and upgrade if you like it.
I rated this app 87 out of 100.