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Wine Spectator's Vintage Charts+ app joins a collection of wine apps

We are still very much in the early stages of the app development game, but sometimes you have to wonder about missed opportunities. Wine Spectator magazine, the elite title for wine snobs, just released an iPhone app. (And it’s not called Wine Snob.)

Welcome, Wine Spectator, and thanks for a free app. But here’s the problem: the app, called VintageChart+ By Wine Spectator, can be tough to find.

By my count, there are about 60-plus apps that use the word “wine” in the name. More broadly, hundreds of apps include topics relating to wine. Basically, the app store is swimming in wine apps.

Good luck finding the right vintage.

The Wine Spectator app is intended to help wine lovers make the right selection whether they are at a restaurant or retailer. Here’s a snippet of how Wine Spectator describes its app (link is to complete story):

VintageChart+ gives consumers a simple, effective way to compare the relative quality of wines from different regions and years, so that they can make smarter decisions when faced with unfamiliar bottles. Each year, Wine Spectator editors analyze vintage quality for 54 different regions and varietals around the world, providing ratings, recommendations on when to drink the wines and descriptions of the growing season’s impact on the wines’ character. Each time our editors revise a chart, this information is automatically updated in the app.

There are other features, including maps of wine regions. But the app store has been offering this type of product almost since it launched in 2008. Indeed, here’s a story about top wine apps I edited for Appolicious in August of 2009. It includes apps that help you decipher wine lingo, determine food pairings and how to manage your wine collection.

I’m sure the Wine Spectator app will add some value to this collection of wine apps, but it’s clearly late to the party.

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