Natalie MacLean Wine Picks
70 out of 100

Published Thursday, October 13, 2011

Overview

Natalie MacLean is an award winning Canadian based wine writer, who has been writing books and sending out her interesting Nat Decants Newsletter for as long as I can remember. Her focus is often on wine and food pairings and this Wine App. gives some strong advice on food pairings.

Be aware though that while the App. is free to download it is not fully functional without a yearly subscription of £24.99. If you have this subscription you get access to Natalie's massive collection of wine notes and the ability to add your own notes. However, it is not straightforward to subscribe, I tried for 30 minutes but had to admit defeat. As a result this review will cover the other aspects of this App.

When the App. first starts you are met with a series of tabs along the top:- Pairings, Reviews, Cellar, Recipes and more.
Pairings lets you choose from a number of grape varieties or appellations. It then gives a list of general food matches. Some of which are very weird and wonderful. While this is a good idea, sadly food matching on a grape variety is a terrible approach particularly in the New World where one producer may make a light low tannin shiraz, while its neighbour may make a massive heavy brooding wine, a completely different style of wine requiring a completely different food match. Appellation based pairings are far more reliable as the producers are forced to follow rules to produce a more homogeneous range of wines.

The Reviews Tab :- It is possible to get lists of Natalie's wines, including a range of top wines she has enjoyed, The App. claims you can use a bar code to scan for wines Natalie has reviewed but this requires the £24.99 yearly subscription. It does kindly tell you that there is a review for the wine, however you need to pay the fee before it will show you the wine. You can search for the wine, however I could not get it to display any wines that it said it had reviews for with the bar code scanner. Searching for very generic Jacobs Creek shows a number of wines but no reviews. Natalie does give her top wines by colour and style with a Top Rated and Best Buy Awards. The wines are there for non-subscribers but again there are no tasting notes, just the general food pairings based, I presume, on the grape or appellation.

The cellar requires you to log in and after much effort I managed to do this. The screens are very basic with no pre-filled information or drop downs. It is simply a log of values, it is slow going entering notes. And so it appears not to provide any additional functionality that a spread sheet could do.
The recipe section gives a number of recipes, but here I think Nat misses a trick by not giving a wine recommendation to any of the recipes, so you are left wondering what they have to do with a Wine App. That said, some of the recipes look good and I may even try a few!

The More Tab again asks you to log in but if you ignore this and press the home button you come to a list of additional functionality including Nats Blog, a prologue to her book Red White and Drunk All Over. There is a very good quotes section. I knew about half of them, but some are really good. There is a link to Nat on TV which is a listing of You Tube videos she has made. Sadly my phone would not play any of these. There is also a wineries listing. First you select the country then the region and it provides a list of wineries. Some have lots of detail others just the name, some countries just hang as there is obviously a bug in this as well. The final section in More is Weird Wine Facts, and here there are a number of weird wine facts but not many before it repeats the quotes in the previous section.
In general I think this could be a terrific App. but it is let down by lots of poor bugs. The use of back button and a home button implies that the phone layout and design was written for an iphone, and has simply been ported to Android but without much care and consideration.

I do hope this App. will get the TLC that it needs but at present it is a mish mash of bugs and part functionality. Unless you have a particular interest in Canadian wines, then there is little point subscribing to her reviews as these are very US Canadian centric. Without the subscription the App is hobbled and is very buggy.