Hello Vino 87/100

Published Thursday, March 20, 2014

Overview

Hello Vino Claims to help you find the perfect wine in the store that will go with you meal. It appears to do this primarily by selecting the grape variety that it believes would match the wine then provides a number of wines that are matched to it. These are identified by value, critic acclaim or another called Vino which I was unsure of. It also suggested other grape varieties and styles. In general these appear to be fairly sensible and mainstream. There are obvious wines and styles they don't recommend but if you know nothing about wine then you have a good starting point.

I have done masses of work on food and wine matching over the years and the method used by Hello Vino appears to be very French based, with balancing flavours and structure. For example the wines recommended for a Pad Thai, one of my favourites at the moment is Pinot Noir. I suspect they have gone with this as it is often low in tannin and Pad Thai can be spicy sometimes. However if I was after a traditional match to my prawn Pad Thai I may have gone for a white wine. With Riesling also being recommended as an optional grape variety this was great to see. Some of the Rieslings recommended were dry others where sweet, Normally if I was going down a traditional recommendation I would go for the off-dry to medium sweet wine. But if I was following what I call a more Asian approach to food and wine matching where you order hot food because you like hot food and don't want to dilute the favour with sugar, I may go for a bigger red wine. But if you don't know anything about wine and food matching then the simple approach taken by Hello Vino will help you avoid some of the clanger mistakes. But given that 80% of wine goes with 80% of food, it is really only those who are very nervous that would get confidence with the App.

There are little problems everywhere I could of crashed several times while using the app, and some of the styles are not what I would expect. For example Prosecco is described as a lightly sweet sparkling wine from the veneto region with aromas of pears and lemons. I typical expect Prosecco to be dry, yes it can be sweet, but by and far the most common I see is dry. It may be in the US where the sweeter styles are more popular.

Hello Vino appear to be very American centric with lots of American producers some quite small along with big brands from other countries. In the UK I have not seen many of the US wines recommended but the big brands are often available and easy to find. I could not work out how to change the country of residence to see a more local selection or perhaps the wines in my own currency as prices are all in US dollars.

The search facility looked pretty exciting. Search by taking photo, text search and by food selection.

Search by taking a photo was the most exciting to me. To pick up a bottle on the shelf take a photo and get a list of reviews or perhaps food matches sounds like a brilliant feature. This is also a revenue stream as you need to pay for this feature. I purchased $0.99 of credits for the app which allows 20 searches. I tried this with a number of bottled around the house. Sadly I continued to get a number of messages saying the lighting was not good enough. This was even when the photo taken looked crystal clear or taken outside in overcast but bright conditions. If I positioned the bottle on an outside table in just the right light it would process it. However only 2 of the 5 wines I tried were found. Some like the Alvear PX sherry rated 98 by Robert Parker could not be found. Baron de Brane (secondly label to Brane Cantenac the top Margaux and Cru Classes estate was as well as a Waitrose wine Loire Cab Franc. When a match was found all I got for my money was the name of the wine which I could read off the label. Again this may work better for common US wines. I am also concerned about this functionality in a wine store where to protect the wines from light exposure, many of the better ones have poor lighting.

It does allow a search by free text so I searched for Tesco. It returned 12 wines none with reviews or any information other than US prices. There was no new information that was not on the label and I could not then find a food recommendation for any of them. The more common US wines did give food pairing options which was excellent.

In all I found Hello Vino's attempts to provide food pairings to be good. It is limited by the philosophy of food matching they have taken and that food matching while something people worry about is hard to get wrong. The search facility was very limited from a UK point of view and its American centric approach meant I don't think I could use it effectively in store with a lack of wines. But if I was in the US then it could be a lot more useful.
I rated this app 87 out of 100 with a cavet that it probably works best in the US.