Talk-A-Vino

This post is a part of the Wine Apps series, introducing different wine apps available on the market. In this series, I offer all the interested Wine App makers to present their applications to the readers of this blog in a short and concise way. Today I would like to introduce to you the wine app called Winescapes. This blog post is written by M Rajagopal (Raj or Rex to friends; @rexraj on twitter), a Co-Founder & Director with Buzzle Networks, a developer of the Winescapes application. Please note that this post is provided as is, strictly as a service to my readers and it doesn’t constitute my endorsement of the app.

Winescapes is a social wine app with commerce features meant for casual wine drinkers everywhere.

Winescapes helps users to find most popular wines meeting their preferences and budget in a store or online, using the unique text chat search feature or the GUI version of this. The chat and GUI search are designed to help users search for the wines the way they think, i.e. “USA, California, Chardonnay, Fruity, 20” (20 here is the price limit in the local currency, so it would be $20 for US). As the result of the search, users will get a set of most popular matching wines rather than only one wine to choose from. This is unlike other search options which show only one wine at a time using name or a label. Matching wines are sorted in descending order of peer votes across the system. Nearby merchant stores with their offers are automatically shown during wine results, if required permissions are set by the user.

User’s wine actions are: Vote Up or Down, Add to Wish list, Cellar and Shopping List, Recommend to followers, Share with social network. Using camera action, user can share a wine label image including the vote and review with his/her Winescapes and social networks on FB, Twitter etc. The cumulative number of Votes and other counts help users make purchase decisions. The user can see less or more details on a wine from Wine Summary and Detail respectively. He/She can also see offers/deals from registered merchants and to find suitable merchants, both offline and online, and see their wine catalogs.

Winescapes’ social features include people search, follow, invite to WS. Wine results can be seen across Winescapes or only within My Network. Notifications show My Network’s wine and other actions since last login. User Profile shows all “my past wine” and people actions. Permissions can be set at a granular level for each activity as Share or Private for Votes, Wishlist etc. The IdeaXchange Q&A forum in the latest release allows users send wine queries to the Winescapes network.

Currently the database has top selling wines in California, New York, Florida, New Jersey, with more wines being added daily.

Winescapes App is available on Google Play / Apple iStore at http://is.gd/a7w9GRand web browser (html5) at www.winescapes.net