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If you are looking for a way to impress someone or a group when going out to dinner, having an extensive knowledge of wines is a great way to start. Despite the wide variety of wines available and accompanying price ranges, many know only what they are accustomed to seeing at local restaurants. This is so much the case that Sommeliers, or wine experts get paid well to disseminate this information. There is a whole world of wine and wine etiquette that many are simply unaware of.

What if you could have your own personal Sommelier on your device? WineStein Sommelier for Android attempts to achieve this daunting task.

Enter WineStein

WineStein Sommelier is not just a “digital sommelier”, but a social network just for the wine world! It touts being able to match any wine with any dish, any dish with any wine, allows you to search for restaurants which carry certain wines and even lets you purchase wine directly!

Signing up is simple. You can sign up using your Facebook log in or by creating an independent account. This will be much appreciated by those wishing to keep their personal information private. Create a username and password and you are ready to go.

Using WineStein

After creating an account, the startup screen gives you several choices. You can “Pair Your Dish”. This allows you to enter in any dish and pair it with an appropriate wine. You can literally enter in any dish, or the main portion of a dish. To test this, we simply entered beef and watched close to 371 results appear from its extensive database. Everything from Biefstuk to Flank Steak was displayed.

Tapping on one of the dishes shows you the ingredients of the dish and the “Meal DNA”. This welcome feature breaks down the taste of the dish using a bar graph. Attributes such as “Sour”, “Bitter”, “Salty”, “Sweet” and more are used to communicate this information. From there, the user can pair the dish with the appropriate wine or modify the dish. You can also save it to “My Dishes”, a favorites list.

In the case of Flank Steak, 171 wines appeared when tapping on “Find Wines With This Dish”. Tapping on any of the wines gives you information about the wine. Its origin, price range, serving advice, grapes used and the DNA (taste information) of the Wine.

Just as you can pair a wine with a dish, you can also do the reverse by tapping “Pair Your Wine”.

Other Goodies

The choices on the startup screen are mirrored as icons at the bottom of the screen. Icons for “Shops” and “Restaurants” are present. You can locate shops to purchase your favorite wine, or locate restaurants which serve the wine you desire. Any of these places are displayed on a map with local establishments prioritized. If you sell wines, you will enjoy the fact that you can register with WineStein so people can find you and do business!

Verdict

WineStein Sommelier has so much to offer. While there is a premium version available, it is hard to believe that they were able to pull this off and offer a free version of this app. There is simply so much information and so many features available that if it were $20, we would still be okay with it. The app listing in the major app stores brags that this app can make you a wine expert, or allow you to have a wine expert in your pocket. This claim is about as true as it gets. WineStein certainly hits a homerun in our books. This app is a must have. Five out of five stars. We would give it six out of five if we could.

GMA