Buy Great Wine and Drink It, Too!

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Have you ever stood in the wine section at your local grocery store or Costco and felt completely and utterly lost, unsure of which bottle is the right one for you? Finally, you no longer have to be a sommelier to buy wine like one!

A free mobile application is taking the guesswork out of finding and purchasing wine. The new Natalie MacLean Wine Picks & Pairings app lets you use your smartphone camera to snap a picture of any bottle label bar code in the liquor store. With one click, you can get tasting notes, scores, and food pairings.

“You’re in the wine shop wondering if you should buy the bottle with the castle on its label or the one with the fluffy squirrel,” says Natalie MacLean, the editor of one of the largest wine web sites at www.nataliemaclean.com. She created the tool to make buying wine easier for consumers. “Now you just point and click to find out if that pinot noir actually is a good wine to go with [tomorrow night’s dinner]. No more guesswork based on castles and critters.”

You can scan the wines right in front of you at the store. The app’s key features allow you to:

– Instantly access tasting notes, scores, prices, recipes and food pairings
– Search 150,000 wines at liquor stores across the country
– Track your purchases in your virtual cellar with just a few clicks
– Create a wine journal with your own wine notes and pictures in the app
– Share your wines and pairings on Twitter and Facebook

The app, designed by Fluid Trends, bundles a suite of 10 wine apps including reviews, cellar journals, recipes, food pairings, articles, blog posts, a wine glossary, a bi-weekly newsletter, a directory of wineries around the world and excerpts from Natalie’s bestselling book Red, White and Drunk All Over as well as her new book out this fall Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines.

A certified sommelier and winner of the World’s Best Wine Writer award at the World Food Media Awards, Natalie wrote and vetted all the pairings and wine reviews in the app rather than relying on computer-generated algorithms and crowd-sourced material. She is the only person to have won both the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation and the M.F.K. Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing from Les Dames d’Escoffier International, but to amateur wine lovers everywhere, she’s a hero.

Cheers to that!

Download the free  app for iPod Touch or iPhone on iTunes. For BlackBerry, visit App World. For Droid, Nexus One, Nokia, Windows 7 and other smartphones, use the mobilized web site here.

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Mark Masker

Managing Editor | Mark is a freelance journalist based out of Los Angeles. He’s our Do-It-Yourself specialist, and happily agrees to try pretty much every twisted project we come up with.

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