Wine Picker - the sommelier in your pocket
by Startacus Admin
Wine Picker. The pocket sommelier - a social wine app to enjoy food and wine matching!
We’ve all been there. Sitting in a restaurant with friends or family when the time comes to choose the wine. Inevitably there will be some of us avoiding eye contact in the hopes of not being the one handed the wine list; there will be someone honest enough to admit they know nothing about wine; and there will be the one who leaps at the chance to pretend they know it all. Using highly scientific methods, we deduce that a good 99% of the time, you will not be dining with a wine connoisseur, and you will only be detecting notes of pretentious babble. The obvious choice is to just pick the third cheapest wine and sound confident, but perhaps there’s a simpler way to choose a good wine at a decent price...
Wine Picker is that simpler way! It is an app built by a team of 2 - a programmer and a sommelier - that works in both the UK and the US to help you find the best wine to go with your choice of food. All you need to do is choose your restaurant, wine colour, budget, and your chosen dishes, and the app will reduce the wine list to the best 5 options.
If your chosen restaurant isn’t already in the app, you can simply take a picture of the wine list to add it.
There is, inevitably, a social aspect to the app, where you can share your favourite bottles with friends, create private and public groups to share content, and add tasting notes to your wines for both yourself and your connections.
The sommelier of the team is Julien Sahut, "sommelier to the stars", apparently, who has chosen 
wine for the likes of Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp.
He knows that restaurants fail to properly utilise the high markup on wines to generate a higher turnover. So not only can Wine Picker help diners better choose their wine, but it can benefit restaurants which might otherwise end up serving unsatisfactory wine, which naturally results in a lack of sales.
Wine Picker is currently taking part in MassChallenge Switzerland, where they will benefit from world-class mentorship, programming, and resources.
Given how much this easy to use app could help people have a better dining experience, we think Wine Picker deserve their place on the programme and hopefully beyond.
We’ll drink to that.
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Published on: 16th June 2018
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